GEOGRAPHIC INFUUiNCES 
IN AMERICAN HISTORY 



A".CErj rOUY B:MotT.\M . 



CHAUTAUQUA 
IJOME- READING SERIES 




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GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 



IN AMERICAN HISTORY 



BY 



ALBERT PERRY BRIGHAM, A.M., F.G.S.A. 

Professor of Geology in Colgate University 




NEW YORK CHAUTAUQUA SPRINGFIELD CHICAGO 

CI)e Chautauqua J)rc6fi 

MCMIII 



Ev 

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THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 

Two Copies Received 

JUL 3 1903 

Copyright Entry 

CLAs£ ^ XXc No. 

COPY B, 



• • •< 
• • • • 

• • • 



Copyright, 1903, by 
ALBERT PERRY BRIGHAM 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 






-->t h 
IN MEMORY OF MY SON 

CHARLES WINEGAR BRIGHAM 

A LOVER OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY, AN ARDENT READER 

OF AMERICAN HISTORY, WHO PASSED FROM THIS 

LIFE TOO SOON TO FULFIL THE PROMISE OF 

HIS YOUTH, THIS VOLUME IS INSCRIBED 



PREFACE 

In the chapters which follow, an attempt has been 
made to combine the materials of American history 
and geography. One must invent a method as he 
can, for models in this field can scarcely be said to 
exist. The plan chosen is geographic, as might be 
expected from a student of earth science. Each 
division of the book deals with a region which is 
more or less distinct in its physical development, 
and which often shows in the end a good measure 
of historical unity. 

Parkman and Fiske have been among the most 
useful historical authorities ; also McMaster, and the 
''Winning of the West," by Theodore Roosevelt, 
who, as an official and as a private citizen, has shown 
an unfailing appreciation of the physical features of 
our country. 

Prof. Charles Worthen Spencer of Colgate Uni- 
versity has kindly read the manuscript of the vol- 
ume and has made valuable suggestions. It should 
be stated that parts of Chapter I have previously 
appeared in the Geographical Journal of London, and 



vi PREFACE 

a few paragraphs of Chapter VIII were originally pre- 
pared for the Bulletin of the American Geographical 
Society. 

Many have generously aided me in securing the 
illustrations. A considerable number have been 
drawn from the collections of Mr. William H. Rau, 
Philadelphia. I am also indebted to Dr. F. J. H. 
Merrill, State Geologist, Albany ; Rev. A. K. Fuller, 
Newburg ; Prof. J. T. Draper, Holyoke ; Prof. Arthur 
M. Miller and Prof. H. Garman, State College of 
Kentucky; Prof. W. B.' Clarke, Johns Hopkins Uni- 
versity; Prof. Edward M. Lehnerts, Winona, Minn.; 
Prof. Samuel Calvin, State Geologist of Iowa ; Mr. 
G. K. Gilbert, United States Geological Survey ; 
President Benjamin Ide Wheeler of the University 
of California and the United States Bureau of 
Forestry. 

Both the physiographer and the historian may 
often regret omissions or brevity of treatment, but 
such limits are imperative when a vast and twofold 
theme is undertaken in a small volume. 

ALBERT PERRY BRIGHAM. 

Colgate University, 
May, 1903. 



CONTENTS 

Chapter Page 

I. The Eastern Gateway of the United 

States i 

II. Shore-Line and Hilltop in New England . 37 

III. The Appalachian Barrier ... 70 

IV. The Great Lakes and American Commerce 105 
V. The Prairie Country . . . . 142 

VI. Cotton, Rice, and Cane . . . 1 73 

VII. The Civil War 200 

VIII. Where Little Rain Falls .... 230 

IX. Mountain, Mine, and Forest . . . 255 

X. From the Golden Gate to Puget Sound . 286 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



Forefathers' Rock, Plymouth . . . Frontispiece 

i. The Palisades of the Hudson 5 

2. Adirondacks about Clear Lake 9 

3. Hudson Valley and Catskills in Relief . . . .17 

4. In the Mohawk Valley 21 

5. Clay Beds on the Hudson 29 

6. Northern Gateway of the Highlands .... 33 

7. Crawford Notch, White Mountains ..... 43 

8. The Holyoke Dam ....... 51 

9. Shore of Marblehead Neck 54 

10. The Sea from Burial Hill, Plymouth .... 58 

11. View from Mount Holyoke 60 

12. Bar Harbor ......... 63 

13. Gorge of the Susquehanna, Maryland 13 

14. Delaware Water-gap 79 

15. Forested Slopes, Southern Appalachians .... 82 

16. Spruce Forest in the Mountains of Virginia . . . 85 

17. Pittsburg and the Beginning of the Ohio River . . 91 

18. Alleghany Valley at Franklin 93 

19. Cumberland and the Narrows of Wills Mountain, Maryland 95 

20. A Blue-grass Meadow in Kentucky ..... 101 

21. Waste Streams, Niagara Power Company . . . 109 

22. Harbor of Duluth and Superior 113 

23. Mahoning Iron Ore Pit, Minnesota . . . . 119 

24. Ore Docks, Lake Superior 125 

25. Cuyahoga River, Cleveland 129 

26. Shipping in the Chicago River 133 

27. American Locks of Sault Sainte Marie . . . . 135 

28. Duluth 139 

29. Bridge across the Mississippi at St. Louis . • • 144 

30. Forests on Bluffs, Iowa 149 



x LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

FIG. PAGE 

31. River Front, Cincinnati 156 

32. Cottonwoods in Iowa . . . . . .167 

33. University of Nebraska 171 

34. Avenue of Live Oaks, Savannah . . . 175 

35. Orange Grove, Florida 179 

36. River Front, New Orleans . . . . . -185 
27- Residences on River Front, Charleston . . . . 188 

38. Cotton Levee, New Orleans 191 

39. Cotton Wharf, Charleston 194 

40. Mississippi Steamer at Levee, Mobile .... 198 

41. Tennessee River and Lookout Mountain . . . 203 

42. Vicksburg from the West 206 

43. Vicksburg and the River from the North . . . 213 

44. Shirley House and Federal Camp, Vicksburg . . -215 

45. Chattanooga and Missionary Ridge . . . . 219 

46. Moccasin Bend and Chattanooga 223 

47. Shenandoah Valley at Luray ...... 225 

48. Shenandoah River 227 

49. Cottonwoods in Colorado Springs .... 233 

50. Desert Vegetation, Western Utah . . . . -239 

51. Dust Whirl in the Desert 244 

52. Great Salt Lake . 245 

53. Desert Valley and Dry Lake Bed, Utah . . 252 

54. Mountain Road, Ute Pass . . . . . . .256 

55. Bullion at Leadville Smelter ...... 260 

56. Panning Gold at Cripple Creek 265 

57. Marshall Pass 271 

58. Pike's Peak Trail 276 

59. Pike's Peak Railway 277 

60. Appalachian Valley Lands ruined by Floods . .281 

61. Appalachian Slopes denuded by Floods . 283 

62. Golden Gate and University of California . .291 

63. Big Trees, California ....... 294 

64. Cape Disappointment Light ...... 299 

65. Astoria 303 

66. Seattle 307 

67. Golden Gate at Sunset 309 



GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES IN 
AMERICAN HISTORY 

CHAPTER I 

THE EASTERN GATEWAY OF THE UNITED 
STATES 

Columbus did not search for a new continent. He 
sought a new path to an old world. If he had sailed 
due west from Palos, he would have touched the 
eastern shore of North America where the Chesa- 
peake Bay opens upon the Atlantic Ocean. But he 
turned his prows southward to the Canary Islands, 
that thence he might run due west along the 28th 
parallel, to the north end of Japan, which, under the 
name of Cipango, he found upon a map of his time. 
This point was twelve thousand miles distant, but 
reckoning the size of the globe too small, and the 
extent of Asia too great, he counted only upon a voy- 
age of twenty-five hundred miles. Sailing westward 
from the Canaries, he found himself wafted by the 
trade-winds. Hence he daily reported to his officers 
and sailors a smaller number of miles than were really 
traversed, that they might not be scared by their 
fearful progress over the Sea of Darkness. 



2 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

Thus, unwittingly, the discoverers of America were 
heading toward the . West Indies. The Spaniard 
stumbled in at the Mediterranean portal of our con- 
tinent ; for the great seas which we know as the 
Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico lie between the 
great lands, and are as truly a Mediterranean as those 
waters that wash the shores of Europe and Africa. 
Thus the West Indies, Florida, the mouths of the 
Mississippi, and the coastal plain about Vera Cruz 
became forever associated with the Spaniard. His 
power has gone, but he has sprinkled island and 
shore with geographic names which live. 

As early as 1500, European craft began to visit the 
cod banks of Newfoundland, starting an industry 
which has been plied until the present time. Among 
these fishermen were French navigators, and it was 
not many years before Cartier entered the Gulf of 
St. Lawrence, sailed up the great river, looked up- 
ward upon the promontory where Quebec was to 
stand, and called at an Indian village at the foot 
of a small but rugged mountain of volcanic origin, 
which he named Mount Royal. The Indian village 
has given way to a great city, and Cartier's name has 
become Montreal. He is the first of those illustrious 
Frenchmen who made the map of the Great Lakes, 
and explored the Mississippi River to its mouth. 
Champlain, La Salle, Joliet, Marquette, Frontenac, 
— these are the names: Belle Isle, Montreal, Detroit, 
Prairie du Chien, St. Louis, Baton Rouge, — such 
are the memorials of French heroism and French 
occupation. The gateway was the St. Lawrence and 
the Lakes. 



THE EASTERN GATEWAY 3 

Meantime, in 1587, Drake had sailed into the har- 
bor of Cadiz, and " singed the king of Spain's beard." 
In 1588 the sea-dogs of England joined with wind 
and storm and sunk the Spanish Armada, strewing 
the shores of the North Sea and of the Atlantic with 
the wrecks of Castilian greatness. Drake and Haw- 
kins scoured the sea for Spanish treasure. Their 
hands were harsh, but in no other way could English 
shipping keep afloat, or English settlements survive 
in any land. The breaking of Spanish power opened 
the way to English colonies in America. 

Where would the Englishman come upon American 
shores ? The Spaniard held the islands and seas of 
the south ; the French occupied the St. Lawrence ; 
from the St. Lawrence almost to the Gulf stretches 
a system of mountains ; they are not lofty, but they 
are continuous ; they stand back a little from the 
sea. In the north the hills of southeastern New 
England lie between the mountains and the Atlantic. 
From central New Jersey to Georgia we find a flat 
or gently rolling coastal plain. Behind, everywhere, 
is the barrier, a low wall, rugged, however, and broad, 
— the Appalachian Mountains. 

The narrow strip of lowland between the moun- 
tains and the sea was left to the Englishman. He 
made his home about Massachusetts Bay, on the 
Delaware, the Chesapeake, by the rivers of Virginia, 
and on the low coasts of the Carolinas to the Savan- 
nah. He forged the colonies into a chain, and began 
to push over the mountain barrier and through its 
passes until he had occupied Tennessee, Kentucky, 
and Ohio, and driven out the French. Then he 



4 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

swept across the prairies, adopted the Western moun- 
tains as his own, and planted great cities by the har- 
bors of the Pacific. 

Conquering the Dutch, who had anticipated him in 
possessing the best Atlantic harbor of North America, 
he found a narrow but open and easy road, through 
the Appalachian wall, between the seaboard and the 
prairies of the Mississippi. I The Eastern Gateway of 
the United States is the valley of the Hudson and 
Mohawk rivers. 

The history of the Empire State gathers about this 
gateway. When the voyager from the Old World 
approaches the chief city of the New, he sees the 
southern shore of Long Island, and the line of Atlan- 
tic Highlands converging toward the Lower Bay. 
Then he passes the Narrows and enters New York 
Harbor. Leaving the East River on his right and 
continuing northward, he enters the lower waters of 
the Hudson. He may follow its valley for a hundred 
and fifty miles, and at every point the rise and fall of 
the tide will remind him of the ocean which he has 
left behind. 

Eastern New York is occupied by a narrow belt of 
low mountains. In some places these mountains rise 
to moderate heights, and in others they are worn 
to their roots and form a region of hills and rocky 
ledges. These mountain ridges run north-northeast 
by south-southwest and are a part of the great 
Appalachian system. The Hudson cuts across them 
in a long diagonal, in its southward course from Al- 
bany to New York. This is most plainly seen in the 
Highlands. This range, built of hard and ancient 



6 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

crystalline rocks, enters New York from the north- 
east and leaves the state to the southwest, where it 
becomes the Highlands of New Jersey. Through 
it is cut the gorge of the Highlands, barely wide 
enough to carry the river, with steep slopes rising 
to the summits of Storm King, Crow's Nest, and 
Anthony's Nose. 

If Hendrik Hudson had an eye for landscape, he 
did not lack for variety after he sailed the Half Moon 
through the Narrows. The forested flats and low 
hills of Manhattan on the east lay in contrast to the 
precipitous wall of the Palisades that followed him on 
his left for nearly forty miles. He doubtless did not 
recognize in their huge columns the outcropping of 
massive beds of ancient lava. When he reached 
Haverstraw Bay and saw the river broaden to three 
miles, we may safely think that his spirits quickened 
with the hope that the passage to Cathay had been 
found. But he was doomed to doubt as he began to 
thread the Highland gorge. When he emerged on 
the north the river was wide again, and its valley 
more spacious than he had seen it before. Going 
northward, the Catskills would fill his vision as he 
looked westward over a few miles of low country to 
the strong profile that ruled the horizon far along his 
course. Eastward he would see rough and rising 
land, but he could not see that here are the foothills 
of the mountains of New England. As the voyager 
passed the hundred-mile limit from the sea, he would 
find shoal water and many islands, and begin to sus- 
pect, what a few more miles of journeying would 
prove, that he was following a river toward its source, 



THE EASTERN GATEWAY 7 

and that he must turn back and seek in regions yet 
unknown a passage to the far East. 

It remained for others to learn what lay beyond 
the site of Albany. Succeeding explorers climbed 
the slopes on which Albany is built, and thence for 
nearly twenty miles traversed a region of half-sterile 
sands to the Mohawk River bottoms, where Schenec- 
tady now stands. Looking westward, there appears 
a deep V-shaped gap in the uplands. Through this 
gap the river pours from the west. By this channel, 
in the closing times of the Ice Age, flowed the waters 
of the Great Lakes, depositing in the Hudson Valley 
the great body of sands that lies west of Albany. 

The Mohawk Valley, or that part of it which now 
interests us, is a trench nearly one hundred miles 
long, extending from Schenectady westward to Rome, 
in central New York. Easterly it opens into the 
Hudson lowlands, westerly it widens into the plains 
of Iroquois, in other words, the flat bottoms of the 
greater glacial ancestor of Lake Ontario. Viewed 
from near the river, the valley appears to be about 
500 feet deep, with an average width of flood-plain 
of a half mile. Seen more truly from the bordering 
plateau, it is a vast gap, 1500 to 2000 feet deep, its 
upper slopes several miles apart, lying between the 
great uplands on either hand. The parting of the 
waters is at Rome. From that point the streams 
enter Lake Ontario. Once pass this gateway, and 
the path is clear across the lake plains and over the 
prairies and plains to the Rocky Mountains. 

South of the Mohawk are the uplands of New 
York, stretching from the Hudson Valley to Lake 



8 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

Erie. On the east we know them as the Catskill 
Mountains. But these are only lofty hills with rolling- 
tops, and descending by a precipitous slope, or escarp- 
ment, on the east. Seen from the east, along the 
Hudson River, this slope, with its crest, appears like 
a mountain range. It is really the edge, or end, of a 
plateau. This plateau, which is 3000 feet or more 
in altitude in parts of the Catskills, falls to an aver- 
age of 2000 feet in central and western New York. 
The Mohawk gap lies north of the plateau, or may be 
said to be cut through the plateau along its northern 
edge. 

North of the Mohawk Valley the land rises, at first 
moderately, and then more boldly, to the slopes and 
summits of the Adirondack Mountains. While these 
mountains, like the Highlands of the Hudson, are 
ancient and much denuded, they preserve a series of 
bold northeast by southwest ranges, so that there is 
no line or avenue, north of the Mohawk, along which 
a railway could be well constructed. Except for local 
traffic, the mountains are a perfect barrier to com- 
merce and travel. 

The physiographer can look back to an era when 
no Mohawk Valley existed, when the drainage of the 
southern Adirondacks crossed the state to the Penn- 
sylvania region, and he can see that there is a Mohawk 
Valley because a belt of soft and destructible rocks, 
known as the Utica and Hudson shales, extends from 
the region of Albany westward, between areas of 
harder rock on either hand. The valley has a long 
and intricate physical history which cannot here be 
told. It must suffice to say that in ancient days there 



IO GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

was no such valley, that its presence is due to a belt 
of destructible rocks disintegrating for long periods, 
that the ice sheet entered it and overrode it, that the 
waters of the Great Lakes poured through it for a 
time, until they were diverted to their present course, 
leaving the valley to become in due time the channel 
of human intercourse. 

As the traveler, going up the valley, passes Rome, 
the bordering slopes recede on either hand and on 
the north are soon lost to view. On the south, how- 
ever, he sees bold hills, to Syracuse and beyond. These 
form the northern slope of the Catskill-Alleghany 
plateau. The railway traverses a flat country, the 
bed of Lake Iroquois. This plain, studded between 
Syracuse and Rochester with elongated glacial hills, 
continues through western New York, south of Lake 
Ontario. It is a region of high fertility, and is now 
one of the garden spots of the United States. 

The explorers and settlers of this part of New 
York found established here several powerful In- 
dian tribes, — the Iroquois. A few generations before 
the white man came they banded themselves in a 
close alliance known as the Confederacy of the 
Five Nations. They called their country the " Long 
House." The Mohawks were the most easterly of 
the tribes, calling their fair valley the eastern gate- 
way of the Long House, and they were its keepers. 
All the tribes, including Oneidas, Onondagas, Sene- 
cas, and Cayugas, were in a comparatively advanced 
state. They practiced agriculture extensively, lived 
in neat # and comfortable cabins, possessed considera- 
ble industrial skill, were eloquent in public counsel, 



THE EASTERN GATEWAY II 

and were the objects of widespread fear through their 
prowess in war. Whatever their progress, they were 
still savages, delighting in torture and given to occa- 
sional cannibalism. 

Good camping grounds and natural highways have 
usually been found out by savage tribes, and often 
by wild animals, long before civilized man appears. 
Thus the Iroquois had made their own what Fiske 
calls the " most commanding military position in east- 
ern North America." How far their power was due 
to qualities which they had inherited and brought 
with them, and to what measure it came from their 
environment and opportunity, is a question which 
neither the geographer nor the ethnologist is yet 
ready to answer. Whatever be the answer, the Eu- 
ropean immigrant met these sturdy aborigines, and 
found himself in alliance or at war. One avenue of 
approach to the Long House was by ascent of the 
Hudson and Mohawk rivers. A second was through 
the Champlain Valley from the St. Lawrence. A 
third lay along the eastern shore of Lake Ontario. 
Thus, from the first, the rippling waters and border- 
ing flood-plains of the Mohawk were a frequented 
path, traversed by French, Dutch, and English in 
various contact of war and peace with the natives 
of the land. Of these the French were the first to 
invade the Mohawk country. Not far away, at Ticon- 
deroga, Champlain, the first white actor on this stage, 
had aided the Hurons against the Five Nations, and 
had thus, by the enmity aroused, determined for the 
English the ultimate control of the region. A later 
invasion was made by the French along the shore of 



12 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

Lake Ontario, but they were defeated and forced to 
retire. There were peaceful invasions also, for in 
the valley captive missionaries endured torture and 
sometimes death. Most heroic and famous of these 
is Father Jogues, whose fate has recently been com- 
memorated by a shrine of his church, erected where 
he perished, on the edge of a glacial terrace south of 
the river. The final failure of the French to dislodge 
or convert the natives of the valley was fraught with 
weighty results in the history of the new continent. 
Had they won this great highway, they might in later 
years have maintained themselves on the St. Law- 
rence, and might now hold the keys of the New World. 
It was the Hudson-Mohawk Valley which early 
guided the Dutch in their effort to carve a slice from 
the new continent. Under an English commander, 
Hendrik Hudson, they sailed up the river which 
bears his name. At the limit of navigation the Dutch 
later built Fort Nassau below the site of Albany and 
concluded a treaty with the Mohawk Indians. Its 
object was trade, and it went far to prevent French 
control of the valley. They built Fort Orange in 
1622, and thus laid the foundations of Albany. In 
1642 Arendt van Curler entered the Mohawk coun- 
try, reported its lands as " the most beautiful that 
eye ever saw," and was later authorized to buy the 
" Great Flats," where Schenectady now stands. The 
old town and family names of the lower Mohawk 
still bear proud testimony to this wave of immigra- 
tion, in the ever present Fondas, Schuylers, Sprakers, 
Sammonses, Van der Veers, and Yosts of the river 
country. 



THE EASTERN GATEWAY 



13 



The first white settlement in the upper stretches 
of the valley was made by the Palatines in 1723. 
Following the devastating wars of Louis XIV, thou- 
sands of these stricken people left their homes on the 
Rhine and took refuge in England. Some of these 
were sent to America under a compact to reimburse 
the English government for their passage and for the 
allotment of lands. After a period of great suffering, 
first on the Hudson and then on the lower Mohawk, 
a final removal brought them to the German Flats 
Patent, between Little Falls and Utica. Here each 
family received a liberal allowance of the rich allu- 
vium and adjacent uplands of the valley, and their 
descendants have been powerful in the history of the 
state and nation. 

The next wave of immigration which swept up the 
valley was English. In 1784 Hugh White passed 
the Hollanders of Schenectady and the High Dutch 
settlement of German Flats, and founded Whitestown 
on the upper river. His coming was the signal for a 
lively movement from the stony slopes of New Eng- 
land to the inviting fields of the Long House, to 
which the Mohawk was the only road. Then came 
the stream of emigrant wagons, bearing the names of 
Ohio and Indiana, then in the far distant West. 

These successive invasions are vividly recorded in 
the layers of geographic names that are spread over 
New York. Manhattan, New Amsterdam, New York, 
— this is a sample of the record. But in this case 
one of the names is now only a historical relic. The 
Indian tribal names have attached themselves to 
river, lake, town, and county. The student of the 



14 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

ice invasion gives the name of the Indian confederacy 
to the earlier and greater Ontario. Ontario itself is 
one of many melodious aboriginal names beginning 
and ending in o : Owasco, Otisco, Otego, Owego, Os- 
wego, and Otsego. Happily these musical primitive 
names stay with many of our streams : Chittenango, 
Chenango, Unadilla, Genesee, Chemung, and Sus- 
quehanna. 

The Dutch invasion has left plentiful memorials: 
Harlem, Tappan Zee, Kaaterskill, Stuyvesant, Rensse- 
laer, or in the Mohawk Valley, Schenectady, Am- 
sterdam, Fonda, and Schoharie. Palatine, Minden, 
Manheim, and Herkimer, are memorials of the refu- 
gees from the Rhine, settling in the Mohawk coun- 
try. The Englishman marked his presence by names 
from the mother country, though this habit is by no 
means so common as in New England, where the first 
settlers had come, with fresh memories, direct from 
the old home. Still, we have such names as New 
York, Westchester, Albany, and Rochester. Then 
come the records of the pioneer, or prominent citizen : 
such are Dobbs Ferry, Wappingers Falls, and, in 
greater numbers as we go west, Whitestown, Gilberts-* 
ville, Sangerfield, Smithville, Binghamton, or Coopers- 
town. Another stratum is composed of names great 
in our history, as Washington, Madison, Hamilton, 
Clinton, Steuben, or Fulton. And finally we discover 
that a curious shower of classical names fell in early 
days on central New York, the memorials of men 
who, in a pioneer region, revered the ancient culture. 
They may be counted by scores : Utica, Rome, Syra- 
cuse, Ithaca, Homer, Tully, Virgil, and many more. 



THE EASTERN GATEWAY 15 

The stream of travel has never ceased to flow, but 
has rather become thousand fold in the century which 
has passed. Before considering the Mohawk and 
Hudson valleys as a modern highway, however, it 
will be well to observe that they were the theatre of 
important military events in colonial times. English 
forts had been erected on the upper Hudson by the 
year 1709, and before the year 171 2 the chain had 
been extended up the Mohawk to Fort Hunter, forty 
miles from Albany. In 1720, through the influence 
of William Burnet, son of Bishop Burnet and governor 
of New York, forts were built at Oswego and farther 
west at Irondequoit Bay. About the time of the 
French War, a number were built near the present 
city of Rome, or in the vicinity of the Oneida carrying- 
place. " These, and similar efforts on the part of 
the English, served to divert from the French into 
English channels a large Indian trade, and to make 
the route via Mohawk River and Oneida Lake, the 
shorter one between Albany and Canada, the one 
most generally travelled." The Mohawk and Cham- 
plain became thus the great highways trodden by 
hostile forces in the French and Indian Wars, until 
the French rule came to its end in Canada in 1760. 
Local histories are filled with exciting records of mid- 
night attack, weary marches in captivity, and all the 
terrors of border warfare. Here, too, was fought 
one of the less-known but most pivotal battles in the 
struggle between the colonies and the mother country, 
the battle of Oriskany. On the south slope of the 
valley, a few miles west of Utica, the Dutch farmers 
rallied under Nicholas Herkimer, and defeated the 



16 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

English and the Indians, who would otherwise have 
gone down the valley and supported Burgoyne in his 
campaign on the Hudson. The contestants on each 
side numbered but a few hundred, but the result is 
thought by many to have been decisive of the main 
issue of the war. 

The control of the Hudson was far more vital to 
both Americans and British than the holding of the 
Mohawk. By its connection with the Champlain 
Valley it became the focus of strategy in the Revolu- 
tion. While the colonial forces were still about Boston, 
Arnold had advised Dr. Warren that Ticonderoga 
and Crown Point be seized, both because they con- 
tained military stores and because they stood in the 
gateway of the north. Before the British army evac- 
uated Boston, it was suspected that New York would 
be the point of attack, and General Lee, on his urgent 
request from Washington, was permitted to prepare 
for the defence of the city and the Hudson. No one 
can know what might have happened, if Clinton, hov- 
ering in the harbor, had not found that Lee was in 
New York, ready to defend it. To have gained the 
Hudson at that early day would have cut off New 
England from the Southern colonies and put to risk 
the independence of all. Plans for fortification went 
on after Clinton disappeared. The East River near 
Hell Gate, the Brooklyn Heights, and the Highlands 
to the north were included in the scheme. 

When the British forces under Howe did make 
their appearance, in June, 1776, they were not to find 
the lower Hudson an easy conquest. They could 
drive Washington out of Long Island, and they could 




Fig. 3. The Hudson Valley and the Catskills shown in Relief. 



1 8 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

sail past Putnam's obstructions of the North River 
and win at Fort Washington and Fort Lee, but they 
could not get possession of the upper Highlands. 
When Sir Henry Clinton, in 1777, failed to subju- 
gate the Hudson and make connection with Bur- 
goyne, coming from the north, the most promising 
device of British strategy fell to the ground. Ameri- 
can victory at Oriskany and Bemis Heights, and 
British failure on the Hudson, left the great highways 
of New York in the possession of the colonies. It 
was four years later, at Dobbs Ferry, on the lower 
Hudson, that Washington planned the Yorktown 
campaign. In the same old house, occupied as his 
headquarters, Washington and Carleton, in 1783, 
arranged for the departure of the British from Amer- 
ican soil. Here the French allies had been received 
in 1 78 1, and here in 1783, two days after the confer- 
ence with Carleton, a British warship fired seventeen 
guns in honor of the American commander. These 
facts are now inscribed on this old mansion, and 
typify the importance of the Hudson Highlands 
throughout the long struggle. 

In the pioneer days the Mohawk was considered 
a navigable stream, and immigrants and freight were 
conveyed over its waters in boats propelled by poles. 
Several breaks were, however, necessary ; a first be- 
yond Albany, because of the abrupt fall of seventy 
feet at Cohoes, a second at Little Falls, on account 
of impassable rapids over the barrier of hard rocks 
which the stream there encounters, and a third of 
two miles at the Oneida carrying-place, where the 
Mohawk is left to the east, and the winding course 



THE EASTERN GATEWAY 1 9 

of Wood Creek is followed to Oneida Lake. Early 
legislative authority was given for improving naviga- 
tion at these points, and soon after 1791 a canal, three 
miles long, with five locks, was constructed at Little 
Falls, and a further canal conducted boats across the 
Oneida carrying-place. We read that the enlarged 
boats, with five men, could transport, between the 
terminal points of navigation on the river, twelve 
tons in twelve days. Long lines of wagons and stages 
also traversed the bottom-lands, making the valley a 
busy highway between the East and the expanding 
West. 

A continuous waterway, from the tidal waters of 
the Hudson to the blue expanse of the Laurentian 
lakes, became now the subject of serious discussion. 
Enough of the geography was known to suggest the 
possibility of such communication, but the following 
order, issued to a commander on Lake Ontario, in 
1 8 14, shows also the extent of the ignorance that pre- 
vailed. " Take the Lady of the Lake and proceed to 
Onondaga, and take in at Nicholas Mickle's furnace 
a load of ball and shot, and proceed at once to Buf- 
falo." "That means," said the perplexed officer, 
" that I am to go over Oswego Falls and up the 
river to Onondaga Lake, thence ten miles into the 
country by land to the furnace, and returning to 
Oswego, proceed to the Niagara, and up and over 
Niagara Falls to Buffalo ! " 

The demand for a water-route was strengthened 
by the danger that the growing commerce of the Gen- 
esee country would be diverted, either down the St. 
Lawrence to Montreal and Quebec, or by the Susque- 



20 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

hanna to Philadelphia. It is difficult to assign credit 
for the suggestion of an Erie Canal. Probably the idea 
was conceived independently in several thoughtful 
minds. Such a prediction is said to have been made 
by Captain Joseph Carver in 1776. Elkanah Watson, 
describing a westward journey in 1788, voiced his 
" strong presentiment that a canal communication 
will be opened sooner or later from the Great Lakes 
to the Hudson." Gouverneur Morris is reported to 
have said, in 1803, " Lake Erie must be tapped and 
the waters carried across the country to the Hudson." 
He thought there should be a uniform declivity 
between the two, not taking account of locks and 
summit supplies of water. The legislature took up 
the matter in 1808, a survey was made, and in 18 10 
a commission was appointed. The project then fell 
into abeyance until revived by De Witt Clinton in 
18 17. Navigation was finally opened between Lake 
Erie and the Hudson on October 26, 1825. The price 
of transportation from Albany to Buffalo, about three 
hundred miles, gradually declined during the twenty- 
six years after the opening of the canal, from $88 to 
$5.98 per ton. Later, railway competition became ef- 
fective, and transportation from Buffalo to New York, 
in 1885, was but $1.57 per ton. Of the vicinity of 
Rochester it was said, upon completion of the canal, 
that her timber found market and floated away. 
Wheat quadrupled in price. The mud dried up, the 
mosquitoes, the ague and fever, and the bears left the 
country, and prosperity came in on every hand. In 
like manner the salt, gypsum, lime, and grain of 
Onondaga, where is now the great city of Syracuse, 



22 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

found ready market. But it is not enough to cite 
these comparatively local results. The meaning of 
the Mohawk Valley is that the entire region of the 
Great Lakes and the vast prairie and mountain 
regions of the West became tributary to the rising 
metropolis on Manhattan Island. 

A similar story has now to be told of railway com- 
munication through this valley. There was no rail- 
road in America prior to 1826. In that year a horse 
railway, four miles long, was built at Quincy, Mass., 
for the transportation of granite from the quarries. 
In the same year the legislature of the state of New 
York granted a charter to the Mohawk and Hudson 
River Railway Company to build a road from Albany 
on the Hudson to Schenectady on the Mohawk, a dis- 
tance of eighteen miles. This was the first chartered 
railroad in America. It was completed October 31, 
1826, and at once carried four hundred passengers 
daily. This, it will be remembered, was soon after 
through traffic began on the Erie Canal. In 1833 a 
charter was granted for a road to extend from 
Schenectady up the river to Utica, a distance of 
nearly eighty miles. This division was in running 
order in 1836. A further link in the westward series, 
between Syracuse and Auburn, was finished in 1837, 
and from Utica to Syracuse in 1839. A curious 
argument was urged for a break in the chain of 
roads at Utica ; namely, that otherwise it would be- 
come a mere way-station on a great line and its 
business would fail to develop. The discussion shows 
that the consolidation of the future was forecast at 
an early time. Gradually the line was completed 



THE EASTERN GATEWAY 23 

from New York to Buffalo, 450 miles, and became 
known as the New York Central and Hudson River 
Railway, or more commonly as the New York 
Central, one of the greatest railways of the world. 
Four tracks lie side by side from Albany to Buffalo, 
two being used for passenger traffic and two for the 
conveyance of freight. Owing to the abrupt descent 
of the valley slopes to the river, but two tracks lead 
from Albany down to New York. A great num- 
ber of minor railways pour their tribute into this 
artery of transportation, and it is hardly true to call 
Buffalo a terminal point, since many solid trains each 
day push on without change both south of the lakes 
and across Niagara, through Canada, five hundred 
miles farther, to Chicago. Except at West Albany 
there is not a difficult grade or an embankment or 
trestle of any importance between New York and 
Buffalo, and with slight exception this holds good 
from Buffalo to the Rocky Mountains. Two thousand 
miles of splendid country are thus made tributary to 
the harbor of New York through the river gateway 
which we have described. 

About twenty-five years ago a competing line with 
two tracks was constructed and called the West Shore 
Railway. It extends up the Hudson on the west 
side, along the Mohawk on the south side, and then 
closely parallel to the Central Railway to Buffalo. 
For the most part the same towns are served by the 
two lines, and the newer has now become an integral 
part of the older system, so that the New York Cen- 
tral virtually crosses the Empire State with a line 
of six parallel tracks. It should be added that the 



24 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

second telegraph line in America joined Albany and 
Utica along the Mohawk Valley, being finished on 
January 31, 1846. A short line between Baltimore 
and Washington preceded it by two years. 

To sum up, the valley is now threaded by the 
ancient highways, the Erie Canal, six railway tracks, 
and innumerable telegraphs and long distance tele- 
phones by which New York converses with Detroit, 
Indianapolis, Chicago, and other Western cities. The 
passing up and down, day and night, of men, of 
thoughts, of commodities, is like the ebb and flow 
of tidal waves, whose course is only stayed as traffic 
rests on the docks of Europe and of more distant 
continents. 

But it must not be thought that the Mohawk is 
the only road which has been sought out to the West. 
It is only a broader gate with a lower threshold. 
There are other great railways, but none of them 
passes the Appalachian belt at an altitude, as at 
Rome, of 445 feet. A brief comparison will be 
instructive. Take first the roads which traverse the 
Empire State from the seaboard. Much English 
capital was invested in the Erie Railway. Perhaps 
the flow of money would have been less free had its 
sinuosity and heavy grades been known. At 75 
miles from New York it must attain a height of 
870 feet to pass the Kittatinny Mountains. At Port 
Jervis the altitude is 442 feet; at Deposit, 1008 feet; 
near Elmira, 799 feet; and at Castile, 1401 feet, with 
some large embankments and difficult bridges. Like- 
wise the New York, Ontario, and Western Railway, 
running to Oswego and the West, crosses difficult 



THE EASTERN GATEWAY 25 

divides, and rises and falls between low altitudes 
and heights of nearly 1800 feet. The Delaware, 
Lackawana, and Western Railway rises to 1932 feet 
at Tobyhanna, Pa., and in 27 miles descends to 745 
feet at Scranton. Thence it passes into New York, 
where it varies between 846 feet and 1359 feet. 

Of the roads which cross the Appalachians south 
of New York, the conditions are similar. The Lehigh 
Valley road from Philadelphia maintains a course 
below 700 feet for 100 miles, then in 30 miles climbs 
to its summit, 1728 feet, and in 20 miles more drops 
to 549 feet at Wilkesbarre. The Pennsylvania, one of 
the finest roads in America, is obliged to make at one 
point an altitude of 2 161 feet, and has one section of 
five miles whose grade is 80 feet per mile. The Balti- 
more and Ohio road has its summit at 2620 feet. 
Farther south the facts are yet more striking, and it 
is less than twenty years since a railway first crossed 
the southern Appalachians. 

An old writing, dating from 1634, makes reference 
to a company which bought from its Indian owners 
"the island of Manhattan, situated at the entrance of 
said river, and there laid the foundations of a city." 
Here were available lowlands lying by a secure haven, 
and they were seized instinctively as the home of a 
new community. As the inland waterways and passes 
became known, they showed that Manhattan Island 
was at one end of a natural highway. A great terminal 
city has grown up because of the unrivaled combina- 
tion of harborage and lines of interior communication. 

New York could be no other than the chief city of 
the Western Hemisphere. Such a center must be on 



26 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

the Atlantic shore, in the north temperate zone, for 
there commerce is most favored between America 
and the great nations of Europe. Manhattan Island 
has on either side many miles of water front, at whose 
piers the largest vessels can lie. A similar frontage 
is afforded across the North River by the New Jersey 
shore. Miles of wharfage stretch along the Long 
Island side of the East River. That tidal avenue 
leads to the protected waters of Long Island Sound, 
which carry the coastwise trade with New England. 
Southward the inner harbor leads by a narrow pas- 
sage down to the Lower Bay, Raritan Bay, and Sandy 
Hook Bay. When New York shall have become the 
first city of the world instead of the second, she will 
still have ample room for the shipping of all nations 
to rest in her quiet waters. 

The perfection of her harbor might not, however, 
have made her the metropolis but for the inland ways 
to north and west. Down to the completion of the 
Erie Canal she was surpassed by Boston and Phila- 
delphia. The latter was the largest shipping point 
in North America. But when the grain and other 
products of the West began to float down the Hudson, 
the race was won for New York. Ships could come 
to her from foreign shores and get a return cargo on 
her docks. This was true of no other city. Phila- 
delphia and Baltimore have no such favorable open- 
ings into the Mississippi Valley. Boston lies behind 
the Berkshire barrier. About half of all the foreign 
trade of the United States passes through the port 
of New York. If imports are considered, two-thirds 
enter this gateway. 



THE EASTERN GATEWAY 



27 



The human history of the last three centuries was 
possible through the geographical unfoldings of the 
later geological periods. Imagine the northeastern 
United States as standing several hundred feet higher 
than now. There would be no water in the Hudson 
channel except what falls in the Adirondacks and on 
the nearer lands, and runs seaward. The sea border 
itself would be nearly a hundred miles southeast of 
New York. Raritan River would join the Hudson 
from the west. A land stream would come from the 
northeast, along the line of the East River. There 
would be no harbor ; there might be a modest town 
at the confluence of the rivers. Now suppose the 
eastern edge of the continent sinks slowly down to 
its present position in reference to the surface of the 
sea. Eighty miles of lowland would be buried by 
the waters. The fresh water of the rivers would be 
checked and mingled with the brine of the Atlantic. 
The tide would ebb and flow among the bays and 
coves around Manhattan, and its pulse would be felt 
within the pass of the Highlands and far beyond. 
Such was the history, long before man, even the sav- 
age, appeared. The region was elevated and dis- 
sected by the streams. Long courses of rock decay 
wore down the crystalline masses of New York island 
to a lowland, only that they might be more fiercely 
attacked by the drill and dynamite of modern days. 
The softer rocks that lay over and behind the Pali- 
sades lava were disintegrated and swept away. Then 
came the long submergence and the " drowning " 
of the streams, giving deep waters for ships. And 
the tides going in and out serve as a broom to sweep 



28 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

the channel. And, where the tidal scour is not 
enough, man anchors a scow and drives a steam 
shovel through the slime, aiding nature. 

We may add another short chapter. At the close 
of the glacial time the sinking of the land had gone 
farther than at present. Much of Manhattan was 
covered with water. The Hudson estuary was deeper 
and wider than now. In these deeper and broader 
waters, at many sheltered points, fine muds settled 
between the present sites of New York and Albany. 
These muds are often clays, fine, massive, and blue, 
which make the Hudson Valley the greatest brick- 
making district in the world. The connection is sim- 
ple, — unlimited clay, a tidal river, and a metropolis 
to be built. The muds are not all clays. Often they 
are coarse and should not be called muds but sands 
and gravels laid down in deltas, where the Croton, 
Fishkill, Catskill, Mohawk, and Hoosick discharged 
into the long body of tidal waters. We read the 
record again : uplift, and long denudation and valley- 
making ; submergence, greater than now, with soft 
deposits along the valley ; a moderate uplift, bring- 
ing in present conditions and followed by the advent 
of man. 

If clay were not enough, a peculiar limestone is 
found at Rondout, which, when ground, affords the 
finest cement. The marbles of Tuckahoe, the brown- 
stone of the Connecticut Valley, and the granites of 
New England are not far away, and, perhaps most 
important of all, a half-dozen trunk railways bring 
the anthracite coal by easy hauls to the docks of the 
North River. A great city was inevitable. 



30 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

The development of human life along the Hudson 
and Mohawk highway has been parallel to that of 
New York. Of forty-one communities, having the 
rank of a city in the state of New York, eleven are 
on the Hudson and six are on the Mohawk. If we 
extend our view from New York to Buffalo, four-fifths 
of the population and nine-tenths of the wealth of 
the Empire State are found within the counties bor- 
dered or crossed by the Hudson River and the Erie 
Canal. The east bank of the Hudson is almost a 
continuous suburb of New York up to the Highlands. 
Newburg is at the north gate of the Highlands, and 
Kingston has grown up at the mouth of the Wallkill, 
a tidal branch of the Hudson, whose valley offers a 
natural road from the coal region. The Hudson 
Valley, about the entrance of the Mohawk, forms a 
natural center of population. Here is the head of 
navigation, and an open road to the west and to the 
north. These conditions centered here the lines of 
travel from New England. There is no good gate 
opening eastward, but the Westfield and Deerfield 
valleys of the Berkshires find their best western out- 
let here. A fall of water due to blockades of glacial 
origin has given rise to Cohoes, while shipping lines 
the river borders of Albany and Troy. 

The half-dozen cities of the Mohawk are good illus- 
trations of physiographic control. Cohoes has been 
named. Schenectady, with thirty thousand people, 
lies on the great flats, where the river issues from 
the uplands upon the old estuary ground of the 
Hudson. The river itself has dug away the sands 
of its ancient delta and smoothed out a few square 



THE EASTERN GATEWAY 



31 



miles of alluvial floor. Farther up is Amsterdam, 
with twenty thousand people, a center for the manu- 
facture of knit goods and carpets. Little Falls, a 
small but busy city, developed from an ancient 
carrying-place, and by reason of its water-power, the 
primal cause being a dislocation of the rocks, which 
here crosses the river from south to north. The 
harder, older, and deeper rocks were brought up, 
and the river has not yet finished its task of grad- 
ing its valley bottom : hence the " little falls." Utica, 
a city of sixty thousand people, is determined by 
an old fording-place, and receives tribute from south 
and north by railway lines which reach New York 
across the uplands, and open to the St. Lawrence 
through the Adirondacks or along the Ontario low- 
lands. Rome is built at the old Oneida carrying- 
place, where little cargoes were borne over from the 
Mohawk and sent down the sluggish waters of Wood 
Creek toward Oswego. 

Going westward, Syracuse originated by reason of 
the brines found by boring to the underlying gravels, 
but has other reasons for her growth, among which 
is her position along the great highway from east to 
west. A like word may be said of Rochester, while 
Buffalo finds assured greatness in being the point of 
transshipment at the foot of Great Lake navigation. 
Erie in Pennsylvania is the natural correlative of 
Philadelphia, as Buffalo is of New York. But Erie 
is small and Buffalo is great. The explanation is the 
Mohawk-Hudson Valley. So far as Philadelphia has 
a natural gateway to the west, therefore, it is not 
Erie but Pittsburg. 



32 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

If we consider the commonwealths which represent 
the thirteen colonies, New York, more truly than 
Pennsylvania, is the " Keystone " state. On the one 
hand is New England, which, as we shall see in the 
following chapter, stands in many ways by itself. On 
the other, Pennsylvania is an Appalachian state and 
is closely related to Maryland and Virginia. New 
York, with its harbor, its artery of travel, and its front- 
age on the Lakes and the St. Lawrence, is the key to 
the West and the North. She is not hampered by the 
mountain barriers of the South, nor is her traffic 
hindered by the Falls of Niagara, nor by the rapids 
and the winter ice of the St. Lawrence. 

We do not yet know how much physical environ- 
ment molds mental and spiritual life. We cannot 
trace geographical influences in a complete way, but 
we gather hints of their power. The Hudson country 
could not fail to be richer in tradition and riper in its 
harvest of thought than some other portions of the 
commonwealth in which it lies. For geographic rea- 
sons it has an older civilization than the interior. The 
old Dutch life was followed by an incoming from 
England. These elements reacted on each other, as 
both had felt the shock of migration across an ocean. 
Their social and their physical environment was new. 

Dwellers on the lower Hudson must ever feel a 
more or less conscious relation to the sea and have 
a sense of neighborhood to its farther shores. The 
ebb and flow of the tides and the passing of ships are 
tokens of a larger life. More tangible in its effects, 
perhaps, is the near metropolis. Commercial oppor- 
tunity has brought wealth. In some measure, homes 



34 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

on the Hudson may show how wealth has conspired 
with the higher tastes to find serene living where 
nature is beautiful. It would be presuming to assign 
nature's share in the literary unfoldings of the valley, 
but its literature cannot be less than a natural growth 
from soil and atmosphere. The breath of the sea is 
here. Cities and villages are old enough to have 
traditions. Mountains, too rugged to bear but a 
scanty forest, rise from the borders of the river. 
But a few miles away are the mysterious gorges and 
untrodden woods of the higher Catskills. 

Unless one is plying the river for trade, Irving is 
the best guide to the Hudson. No other has so fully 
given speech to her life. We do not know the 
measure of intimate influence that comes on a writer 
from his surroundings, but Irving assuredly laid hold 
upon the traditions and the history of the region, and 
embodied, or shall we say created, the typical spirit 
of the great river. Did he not in some measure do 
both ? His birth was in the year in which the British 
troops left the city of New York not to return. As 
a youth he voyaged up the Hudson, and made many 
journeys along the Hudson and Mohawk in the years 
that followed. In the satires of the Knickerbocker 
story he reveals his knowledge of every phase of local 
history and every nook of the Hudson country. His 
tales of humble domestic scenes in the " Legend of 
Sleepy Hollow " are pictures, and the woods in which 
Rip Van Winkle slept are the living forests of the 
Catskills. The real Hudson becomes more real be- 
cause idealized and seen through the serener atmos- 
phere of the older time. Not far from the Hudson 



THE EASTERN GATEWAY 35 

lived Andrew Jackson Downing, the landscape archi- 
tect, forerunner of a generation that is to increase, 
of men who are to enter into the heart of nature and 
preserve her freshness and beauty, while subduing 
her to the uses of man. 

The poet has not been forgetful of the river. 
Halleck's lines in praise of Weehawken may have 
a strange sound, in the light of modern changes, but 
Drake's "Culprit Fay" can hardly pass out of date 
so long as the imagination touches human feeling. 
This, perhaps, is the poem of the Hudson River, but 
we turn rather to Bryant. His " Night Journey of a 
River" must have been inspired by the river of his 
home, and nothing could better express the subtle ties 
that bind the river and its greatest city than these lines 
from " A Scene on the Hudson " : — 

"River! in this still hour thou hast 
Too much of heaven on earth to last ; 
Nor long may thy still waters lie. 
An image of the glorious sky. 
Thy fate and mine are not repose, 
And, ere another evening close, 
Thou to thy tides shalt turn again. 
And I to seek the crowd of men." 

Within the domain of the Hudson, also, for many 
years John Burroughs has lived in his cottage, and 
gone forth, in winter and in summer, to share and 
interpret the life of her birds and forests. Curtis 
made his home where river passes into ocean. He 
was a lover of the Hudson, and voices his loyalty, if 
such it may be called, to his own land in his fine par- 
allel between the Hudson and the Rhine. " Its 



36 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

spacious and stately character, its varied and magnifi- 
cent outline, from the Palisades to the Catskills, are 
as epical as the loveliness of the Rhine is lyrical. The 
Hudson implies a continent behind. For vineyards it 
has forests. For a belt of water, a majestic stream. 
For graceful and grain-goldened heights it has impos- 
ing mountains. There is no littleness about the Hud- 
son, but there is in the Rhine. . . . The Danube has, 
in parts, glimpses of such grandeur. The Elbe has 
sometimes such delicately pencilled effects. But no 
European river is so lordly in its bearing, none flows 
in such state to the sea." 



CHAPTER II 

SHORE-LINE AND HILLTOP IN NEW ENGLAND 

New England is a geographical province. The 
Berkshire barrier runs from southern Connecticut to 
its culmination in the Green Mountains of northern 
Vermont and divides New England from New York 
and the West. Northward, the St. Lawrence is the 
natural boundary, though its lowlands belong to an- 
other political division. On the east and the south 
is the sea. 

It has, however, other elements of geographic 
unity. It is, with small exceptions, a very ancient 
land, as the geologist counts time. Some of its areas 
have a rocky foundation which is among the oldest 
known, comparing with the Adirondacks, the Pied- 
mont and Blue Ridge of the South, the core of the 
Black Hills, or the ancient lands between the Great 
Lakes and Hudson Bay. Other parts of New Eng- 
land have a less but still incomprehensible antiquity; 
such are most of the Green Mountain and Berkshire 
region and the districts about Boston and the Narra- 
gansett. The rocks of the Connecticut Valley in 
Massachusetts and Connecticut are much younger, yet 
their age must be reckoned in millions of years. 
Geologically youthful are parts of Cape Cod, the 

37 



38 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

larger islands, and the barrier beaches and marshes 
of the southeast. 

It may be a more useful description, if we say that 
about all of New England has felt "the disturbing 
forces that build mountains. Most or all of the 
region was once a sea bottom, receiving waste from 
other lands. These sea floors became land by uplift, 
and by powerful folding of the sheets of rock, form- 
ing mountains, of which the Green and White Moun- 
tains are but remnants. But these were not the only 
regions roughened by elevation. If we study the 
rocks of Rhode Island, or about Boston or Worces- 
ter, we shall find them as much disturbed and tangled 
as on the slopes of Greylock or Mansfield. And they 
are usually crystalline, for by crushing, by the action 
of water, and in some cases of heat, they have been 
changed from their original condition. The limestones 
have become marbles in Vermont and along the 
Housatonic ; the sandstones, made from waste of 
still older rocks, have turned into schists, and the 
muds have become shales or slates. 

If such has been the change within, the change of 
outer form has been as great. A land of bold moun- 
tains has become a region of rough hills. This is one 
of the ways in which the great age of the land might 
be determined. Southern Maine and New Hampshire, 
eastern Massachusetts, southern Connecticut, and all 
of Rhode Island, are a rough lowland. Northern and 
western New England may originally have been 
higher than the south and east, — we cannot know, — 
but all was lofty and perhaps Alpine. Time enough 
has passed to make the beds of rock, transform them 



SHORE-LINE AND HILLTOP IN NEW ENGLAND 39 

into mountain ranges, and wear them down nearly to 
the level of the sea. 

At some epochs of this history volcanic fires were 
active, lavas were poured out, and explosive erup- 
tions, like those of Krakatoa and Pelee, sent forth 
clouds of gases and spread sheets of ash over land 
and water. Cones were built, which have been 
long destroyed. Their roots may be found at many 
points along the rocky shores and far inland. Sheets 
of ash and lava still bear testimony to these days of 
fierce changes when New England was an unstable 
region like the Caribbean and Mediterranean. 

The reliefs of northern New England are not so 
well known as those of Massachusetts and the region 
to the south. The three more southern states have 
been completely covered with mapping by the system 
of contours, while in the northern states only patches 
here and there have been thus surveyed. In north- 
ern New England we find the Green Mountains. On 
the one hand are valleys and lowlands leading to the 
Champlain and Hudson, and on the other are the 
slopes and narrow, fertile terraces and flood plains of 
the Connecticut. Rising to the heights of the White 
Mountains, we pass on to the moderate elevations of 
central and northern Maine, culminating in Katahdin ; 
southern Maine and New Hampshire are like south- 
ern New England. 

Through Massachusetts and its southern neighbors 
the crests of the uplands fall in with one another so 
well that we may call the general surface a plateau. 
Viewed from the uplands in western Massachusetts, 
the surrounding uplands have an even sky-line, and 



40 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

we may imagine a continuous surface, which has later 
been broken by cutting valleys through it. We can 
thus think of an upland passing from the Berkshires 
across the present Connecticut Valley, merging with 
the lower region, where Worcester stands and from 
which Wachusett rises. Then we can picture the up- 
land slanting still farther down, east through Massa- 
chusetts, and southward through Connecticut and 
Rhode Island, to the sea. In other words, if we 
could fill up all the valleys, we should have a plateau 
descending from the Vermont and New York border 
to the sea. It would be about two thousand feet 
above the sea in western Massachusetts, about one 
thousand feet around Worcester and in eastern Con- 
necticut, and of less altitude toward the Atlantic and 
the Sound. Physiographers have given attention to 
this slanting land surface. Not seeing how it could 
otherwise have been formed, many think that the 
ancient mountains were worn nearly to sea-level, 
that the resulting lowland was uplifted, and more to 
the northwest, and that the Connecticut, Westfield, 
Housatonic, and other valleys have since been sunk 
into it. Whatever be the truth, this conception helps 
us to see geographic forms truly, and to avoid sup- 
posing that southern New England is an orderless 
jumble of rugged lands. 

Interesting results follow from these contrasts be- 
tween northern and southern New England. Forests 
prevail in one and homes in the other. Maine has 
the size of the other five states combined, but only one 
in eight of the inhabitants. Vermont has two towns 
of more than ten thousand people; Rhode Island has 



SHORE-LINE AND HILLTOP IN NEW ENGLAND 41 

eight. Maine has seven such centers ; Massachusetts 
has forty-seven; while New York has but forty-five. 
Northern New England has no city of sixty thousand 
people, and southern New England has fourteen such 
communities. 

The chief drainage systems have a common direc- 
tion — the greater rivers flow southward. They are 
mainly longitudinal streams, by which geographers 
mean that they follow the lines of mountain foldings. 
Parallel ridges and troughs result from such disturb- 
ances, and such troughs controlled the ancient streams. 
These may have slowly shifted their courses in the 
ages of their development, but they have not departed 
from parallelism with the mountain ranges. All the 
great streams are tidal at their mouths, but some 
have sunk their inland valleys more effectively than 
others. Thus the Connecticut has graded its course 
close to sea-level across Massachusetts, while the bed 
of the Housatonic at Pittsfield is a thousand feet 
above the tide. 

In another way New England has geographic unity ; 
it was all invaded by land ice in the Glacial Period. 
For detailed accounts of the Ice Age, the reader 
should look to special works ; it is within our prov- 
ince here to see in a general way the changes wrought 
on the face of the land. The chief movement was 
from the north and northwest, down upon the Sound 
and the Atlantic. That the ice was thick, we know, 
because it overswept Katahdin, Washington, and 
Mansfield. And we have more startling proof in 
the fact that it disregarded the southern trend of 
the western mountains and valleys, and flowed freely 



42 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

across them on a diagonal. Many years ago this 
was shown by Sir Charles Lyell and others, who 
observed trains of boulders near Richmond, Mass., 
which were carried and distributed in this manner. 

We know that the enveloping mantle crossed the 
place of the present Long Island Sound, and heaped 
its parallel belts of moraine in Long Island. These 
moraines run from east to west, and similar belts are 
found in southern Rhode Island, from Point Judith to 
Watch Hill; along the southern part of Cape Cod, 
from Buzzard's Bay to Nauset Beach ; and along the 
shores of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. These 
and others are the terminal moraines of the New Eng- 
land ice sheet. More full of meaning in our present 
study is the heavy scoring which the surfaces of soil 
and rock everywhere sustained. In a country which 
has not been plowed by the ice, soils develop by the 
wasting of the rocks for long periods. Hence, below 
the proper soils, the surface rocks are discolored or 
half-disintegrated. Nearly everywhere in New Eng- 
land these old soils and corroded rocks were pared 
away, and a new cover of "drift" laid upon the 
freshly exposed and unchanged bed-rock. This drift 
was formed by mingling, in and under the glacier, the 
rock fragments eroded by the ice, and the preglacial 
soils lying to the north and northwest. We are not 
to understand that this new and mixed material had 
been pushed for long distances. Some of it was far- 
traveled, as we know by boulders from remote ledges, 
but most of it came to rest again within a few miles 
of the place of its origin. 

The records of this scoring are often to be seen 




Fig. 7. Crawford Notch, White Mountains. 



44 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

when the bed-rock is stripped. They are the glacial 
grooves, or striae, and also the rounded or elliptically 
carved crests of exposed rocky hills, which were at- 
tacked and polished into their present forms by the 
overriding ice. We are not to suppose that the gla- 
cier removed a large thickness of the rock from the 
general surface. But exposed and narrow elevations 
may have been planed away for many feet, and val- 
leys may have been deepened where powerful ice 
masses occupied them for a long time. Thus the 
complexion of the country was changed not a little 
by giving the surface rocks and soils a hard push and 
a new distribution. 

Much of the drift consists of clay and stones of 
various size, promiscuously mingled and spread, some- 
times evenly, over the land. Moraine heaps and the 
smoother cover of this stony clay are often thickly 
sprinkled with the great boulders which are so com- 
mon a feature in the landscape of New England. 
Sometimes these great stones are delicately perched, 
and some are known as rocking-stones, whose many 
tons may be swayed by the push of a hand. Pro- 
fessor Shaler has ingeniously shown, from these, that 
no violent earthquake could have visited New Eng- 
land since the Glacial Period, else would these stones 
have rolled over and assumed a more stable position. 

There are other sorts of glacial accumulation of 
land waste. Glacialists give the name drumlin to 
hills of curving crest, parallel to each other and 
trending in the direction in which the ice moved. 
Such are the islands of Boston Harbor, though their 
curves have been marred, as sea waves have trimmed 



SHORE-LINE AND HILLTOP IN NEW ENGLAND 45 

the outer edges of these half-submerged glacial hills. 
They abound, unaltered, however, about Boston and 
Worcester and along the lower Merrimac. Such a 
hill is a mass of the boulder clay, or "till," modified 
in form by the ice moving over it. It was formed 
under the ice, therefore, while the moraines gather 
chiefly about its edge. Long gravel ridges occur in 
some parts of New England ; they often have steep 
slopes, a sharp crest, and are serpentine in their 
curves ; they may be flanked by swamps, and thus 
the crest line has not seldom been adopted as the line 
of a roadway ; ridges of astonishing length are found 
in southern Maine. They were usually deposited in 
the beds of streams coursing in tunnels under the ice 
sheet. 

Interruption of the direct flow of surface waters to 
the sea is a most striking result of ice work. Sections 
of old valleys were clogged with drift. Lakes formed 
behind the dam, and in sinking new outlet courses, 
rapids and waterfalls have been formed. In a variety 
of other ways lakes came into existence, and thus to 
the glacier we must attribute the thousands of lakes 
or tiny ponds that form the eye of the landscape 
everywhere and minister in many ways to the needs 
of man. 

Thus two sorts of geological events have affected 
New England everywhere, — the ancient mountain 
building and the recent invasion of the ice. These 
have deeply influenced human life in the few centu- 
ries in which civilized men have dwelt here. The 
rocks are, as a rule, profoundly changed by disturbing 
forces, or they are deep-seated masses brought to the 



46 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

surface by denudation. Hence granites, marbles, and 
slates abound and furnish the best building materials. 
As early as 1737 the Boston builders began to gather 
and dress granite boulders. The walls of King's 
Chapel in Tremont Street grew thus out of the fields. 
In 1825 the quarries at Quincy were opened, the 
chief occasion being the building of the memorial on 
Bunker Hill. Then the use of granite began to be 
general, until every New England state opened its 
stores of this rock, soon to appear in every eastern 
city and burial ground. Great excitement was aroused, 
when, in 1697, some one found limestone at Newbury, 
in Massachusetts. Thirty teams a day were soon 
hauling it from the newly opened quarries, for here- 
tofore the colonists had depended on the shells of the 
seashore for their lime. But most of New England 
limestone is in the form of marble and lies along her 
western border, in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and 
Vermont. Another product of geologic change is 
the beds of slate, made from ancient deposits of clay. 
As Vermont leads all the states in marble, so it is 
second only to Pennsylvania in this product, while a 
few quarries are open in Maine and Massachusetts. 
Isolated mineral industries are afforded by the mica 
deposits of Grafton County in New Hampshire and 
the corundum of Chester, Mass. 

The soils are the waste of these ancient rocks, 
stirred by the glacier and mingled with the products of 
plant decay. It is not merely a modern notion that 
New England soils are somewhat barren. An old 
writing on Virginia, dating from London in 1649, 
says of the Northern colony, " Except for the fish- 



SHORE-LINE AND HILLTOP IN NEW ENGLAND 47 

ing there is not much in that land, which in respect 
of frost and snow is as Scotland compared with Eng- 
land, and so barren withal that, except a herring be 
put into the hole that you set the corn or maize in, 
it will not come up." This would scarcely appeal to 
the gardeners about Boston, and doubtless the writer 
had not looked upon the lands that were to become 
the tobacco fields and peach orchards of the Connec- 
ticut Valley. 

Yet it is true that the uplands predominate, and 
the soils of the uplands are not rich. Much of the 
fine soil material of the preglacial time has been 
washed into the sea by the streams that flowed forth 
from the ice sheet. The drift, from which the true 
surface soil is derived, contains a large proportion of 
coarse waste, broken mechanically from the bed-rock 
by the plucking and grinding of the ice, and thus the 
minerals are not ready for the nutrition of plants. 
The soils are often thin, or lie on steep and bouldery 
slopes, and the range of crops is limited by the shorter 
summer and severer cold of the winter months. The 
decline of general agriculture has been a central fea- 
ture in the later history of New England. No end 
of writing has found here a theme, and a few of the 
writers have viewed the change with cheerfulness, 
but more with despair. It is not inspiring to see 
family mansions decay, farms abandoned, and un- 
tended roadways furrowed with incipient ravines, or 
to find villages in stagnation, with churches neglected, 
ancient academies abandoned, and the ambitious chil- 
dren of the fathers gone to the cities, the prairies, 
and the Pacific coast. But the history could not be 



48 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

different in the geographic unfolding of the United 
States. 

While a compact people of English birth were held 
together on this first American ground, they forced a 
living from the soil, and built at last the New Eng- 
land of fifty and a hundred years ago. But the prai- 
ries and the great Northwest have settled the case 
for the farmer in New England. He must change 
his occupation or give himself to special forms of til- 
lage, and while there is hardship and pathos in the 
change, the end is not to be deplored. There are 
weights to be thrown into the other side of the bal- 
ance. Shaler has shown how the very coarseness of 
the soil elements insures permanence : these minute, 
pebbly fragments of rock will gradually disintegrate 
and yield, in soluble form, the elements needed by 
plants, and the soils may continue to have moderate 
fertility long after the soils of the Mississippi Valley 
are exhausted, or begin to require large use of ferti- 
lizers. And it is wholly to be desired that much New 
England upland should relapse into forest. Moun- 
tainous and glacial conditions have combined to fit 
these lands for trees and for nothing else. 

In some neighborhoods new methods of tillage, 
carried on with greater intelligence, and often in- 
volving special crops, for which the soil is fit or for 
which there is local demand, are beginning to change 
the face of rural New England. New and better 
roads will bring into contact with the general life 
many corners that have been smothered by their 
isolation. As population grows, the swamp lands, of 
which there are some thousands of square miles, 



SHORE-LINE AND HILWTOP IN NEW ENGLAND 49 

will begin to be reclaimed. They are in patches in 
the interior and along the shore-lines, and are either 
glacial or tidal in origin. They will be largely re- 
claimed and become as productive lands as anywhere 
lie under the plow. 

Nature, as we have seen, invites the permanence 
of the forest in New England, and man has not yet 
completed his defiance of her will. Fifty years ago 
it was thought impossible to exhaust the pine forests 
of Maine; by 1880, however, the Pine Tree State 
was importing white pine from Michigan and Canada, 
and her lumbering was mainly upon the spruce, which 
in early days was left almost untouched. Still, the 
white pine was not destroyed ; for in many areas the 
second growth has been spared, forest fires have 
been restrained, and the beginnings of rational for- 
estry are practiced. Intelligence is growing and 
conviction is deepening in New England, and there 
is hope that the lumberman's ravages in the White 
Mountains may be stayed, keeping the crown of 
glory on the uplands, and saving the valleys from 
destruction by floods of water and by the hillside 
waste which devastates the fields of the riverside. 

Even Connecticut is a much forested state. Her 
stirring towns, growing cities, and farms of the low- 
lands appeal first to our thought ; but a forest map of 
Connecticut carries the green, used as a symbol of the 
woodland, widely over the state. Such a map seems 
more green than white, and points to wide areas on the 
east and west of the central river suited only to the 
growth of trees. 

A recent writer has drawn a picture of the neigh- 



5<D GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

boring state, — its western half, — "In Wildest Rhode 
Island." A strange title is this for the smallest and 
most densely peopled of our states, and one of the 
most ancient, centering in great towns and busy 
villages with humming spindles, on the waters of 
Narragansett. But draw a line from north to south, 
dividing the little commonwealth into halves. West 
of the line are ten back townships and less than six 
per cent of the population of Rhode Island. Here 
are some of the well-worn mountains of New Eng- 
land. Rightly do we call them hills, for they show 
but a few hundred feet of relief. In five of these 
townships, during the last century, there was a loss of 
one-third to more than one-half of the people. All 
the features of New England rural decline are here ; 
and whether forests, and estates of the rich, or truck 
farms, towns, and electric railways will cover these 
lands in future days is a question unanswered. 

Yet another persistent thread of New England his- 
tory began to take form in glacial times. Before 
these days the streams had flowed so long in their 
courses that they had smoothed their channels and 
made easy grades to the sea. When the ice finally 
disappeared, these old valleys were often left in a 
condition of blockade. Banks and massive piles of 
drift lay where the waters had run, and they forced the 
renewed streams to seek other courses. In a short 
distance, commonly, the old valley would be resumed, 
but in passing around the barrier the river would 
sink its channel upon the rocks, forming water- 
falls, or rapids. This concentration of descent has 
created the available water-power of New England 



52 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

and determined the sites of many of her towns and 
cities. 

The Rev. Samuel Peters, who, being a Tory, took 
refuge in London in Revolutionary days, had visited 
the Connecticut Valley, and described the river as flow- 
ing fast enough at a certain point to float iron crow- 
bars. Here grew up Bellows Falls, with its factories; 
and the visitor may read more sure proofs of the river's 
power in the pot-holes that pierce the rocky bed, 
and in the terraces that rise like stairs on the slopes 
above the town. 

Several inland cities have a similar origin. Such 
are Lewiston in Maine, Manchester in New Hamp- 
shire, and Lowell, Lawrence, and Holyoke in Mas- 
sachusetts. Lowell is a splendid example, founded 
three-quarters of a century ago, and having now nearly 
one hundred thousand people and about one thousand 
factories and mills of various kinds. This great center 
of production was located by a physiographic feature, 
— the falls of the Merrimac. For a similar reason Hol- 
yoke has grown up on the Connecticut River, with its 
great granite dam, its spacious raceways, and its enor- 
mous business, in which, as well as in population, it has 
become a rival of its near neighbor, Springfield. 

Some cities combine the advantages of water-power 
and tidal highways. In other words, the falls or 
rapids of glacial origin occur at the head of tide- 
water, and cities would naturally follow, — such as 
Pawtucket, Norwich, Fall River, and Augusta. It is 
to be remembered that in many cases, as notably at 
Fall River, water-power has been largely supplemented 
by steam, since, once established, a manufacturing 



SHORE-LINE AND HILLTOP IN NEW ENGLAND 53 

industry is likely to develop in a center made famous 
by it far beyond the limits of the available power. 

The state of Maine has about 230 miles of shore- 
line, reckoned in a direct line from Kittery to the St. 
Croix River. But if one should follow the border 
of all its bays and headlands, and encircle all the 
islands, he would traverse more than two thousand 
miles of beach, so intricate is the labyrinth of the Pine 
Tree State's ocean border. For the most part it is a 
rugged shore. Rocky headlands stand out to sea, and 
meshes of landlocked waters extend inland from ten to 
forty miles. The only part of the shore-line that is not 
thus broken is between Kittery and Portland, at the 
southwest. All the rivers have tidal mouths, and illus- 
trate in their cities, in a small way, the conditions of 
London, Bristol, and Liverpool. These deep valleys 
are commonly explained as due to river work when the 
land was higher than now, with submergence follow- 
ing. It is the same story as that of the Hudson, but 
we do not know how much the channels were deepened 
by glacial ice. Glacier, river, and the sinking of the 
lands may have joined with the sea in fashioning such 
a shore-line. 

V\ Massachusetts has also a rough shore-line, but with 
more variety than in Maine. Long strips of sandy 
beach alternate with coves and deep and spacious 
bays. Cape Ann is a well-worn but still jagged 
headland, thrust out among the breakers of the 
Atlantic. Tipped with granite and girded with vol- 
canic dikes, this land is not easily overcome by the 
onset of the waves. On the south a secure haven 
has led to the growth of Gloucester; but to the north 



54 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

are the long, smooth curves of Plum Island and Salis- 
bury Beach, kept apart only by the outflow of the 
Merrimac. These are low and sandy barrier beaches, 
built and shaped by wave and wind, and backed by 
salt marshes and quiet bays, south and north of 
Newburyport. 




Fig. 9. A Rocky Shore, Marblehead Neck. 

South of the Cape is Boston Bay, with a ragged 
shore, but not so broken as in more ancient days. 
The work of waves and currents tells its own story, 
if we study a large-scale map. Low and narrow 
beaches have been built, joining former rocky islands 
to the mainland, giving us Marblehead Neck and 
Nahant. The drumlins are wave-worn and have 
helped to furnish the lines of waste that now offer 
a continuous succession of curved shores from Point 
Shirley to Point of Pines. Such is the story of Nan- 



SHORE-LINE AND HILLTOP IN NEW ENGLAND 55 

tasket Beach from Long Beach Rock to Point Aller- 
ton. These beaches and the islands that lie between 
seclude Boston Harbor from Boston Bay and protect 
the shipping from Atlantic storms. The Mystic, 
Charles, and Neponset rivers have shallowed the 
fringes of the harbor, and man has contributed his 
own large share to create dry lands for the Eastern 
metropolis. 

Then Cape Cod sends its magnificent curve into 
the Atlantic and incloses the waters of Massachu- 
setts Bay. Here the hard rocks give way, and lands 
of modest altitude are composed of youthful strata 
mantled with glacial drift and shifting sand-dunes. 
Lakes and swamps abound, and smooth shore-lines 
rule from Buzzards Bay around to Provincetown, and, 
indeed, nearly everywhere, also, on the inner shore of 
the Cape. The narrow eastern arm of the Cape was 
once wider than now, but the waves, attacking from 
the east, have trimmed the shore-line, and the result- 
ing land waste has been swept up and down the 
shore, or drifted out into deeper waters. Southward, 
Nauset Beach and Monomoy Island have been 
formed. Northward, the sands have been carried 
around to the west and south, building the hooked 
spit that incloses Provincetown Harbor. Sparse 
population, little towns, and limited tillage of the 
soil, — such is the law that nature lays upon this frail 
and exposed foreland. 

Much that may be said of Cape Cod is true of 
Marthas Vineyard and Nantucket. The eye needs 
but little training to mark the moulding of waves and 
currents on these shores. Nantucket is a crescent, 



56 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

with its concave shore fronting the mainland, trimmed 
here and built out there, until the lines are smooth 
and flowing. In old days many shallow bays pierced 
the southern lowlands of Marthas Vineyard. Every 
intervening headland, built of yielding materials, has 
been shortened in, and the eroded material swept 
across the openings of the bays, making them into 
lakes. 

Turning again to the mainland, we may contrast 
the ragged outline of Buzzards Bay with the smooth 
borders of Cape Cod. To the westward, the edge of 
the lands resembles that of Maine, but is not so con- 
tinuously irregular. Narragansett waters are, how- 
ever, deeply landlocked, and represent a "drowned" 
trunk stream, whose chief branches were the Taunton, 
Blackstone, and Pawtuxet. Here we have the great 
physiographic feature of Rhode Island, and it is 
hardly too much to say that the existence of the state 
as an independent commonwealth hinges upon it. 

In Connecticut a dozen large towns and cities line 
the waters of bays or stand near the mouths of tidal 
streams. The Mystic, Thames, Niantic, Connecticut, 
Quinnipiac, Housatonic, and Norwalk are the tidal 
rivers, great and small, that enter the sound. The 
Thames is followed by the tides to Norwich, fifteen 
miles, and the Connecticut to Hartford, more than 
forty miles. The fading out of the uplands makes 
a shore-line railway possible, and the protected waters 
of Long Island Sound offer a parallel highway for 
coastwise communication. 

New England has been compared with Northern 
Europe. These regions are alike in important ways, — 



SHORE-LINE AND HILLTOP IN NEW ENGLAND 57 

in their low and ancient mountains, in the prevalence 
of the glacial ice, and in their broken shores. Every 
city of the sea border has a story well worth the 
telling, and none of more variety and fascination 
than peaceful and ancient Salem, with its decaying 
wharves, which no more receive consignments from 
the remotest lands. As with New York, so in a less 
striking way here, the lines of inland communication 
have turned the balance. Boston has a more spacious 
harbor than Salem, and from Boston the great rail- 
ways lead out westward. Where the railways meet 
the shipping gathers also, and Boston is the one 
great port of New England. Portland, Providence, 
and New London must be content with coastwise 
shipping because Boston is the New England link be- 
tween foreign lands and the interior of our own. But 
the records of the past may well remind us that Salem 
once led the shipping of the United States, and Prov- 
idence sent more vessels from her harbor than set sail 
from the piers of New York. 

Many New England coast towns have seen their 
life transformed through the decline of fishing. 
Several causes have led to this decay. Canadian 
catches have been admitted on more favorable terms ; 
the Chesapeake, the Great Lakes, and the salmon of 
the Pacific have come into competition; other marine 
foods have grown in favor ; and preservation in various 
ways has made the rivalry of remote regions effec- 
tive. Hence the houses of Marblehead may be as 
quaint and her streets as narrow as they were, but 
shoes have taken the place of the fisherman's schooner 
and the sailor's yarns. Yet New England has her 



58 



GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 



calling from the sea and can never turn her face alone 
to the land. Even fishing thrives, but centers itself 
at a few places, as at Gloucester, after the more effec- 
tive fashion of modern times. Many a fisherman has 
turned to lobster-catching, which saves him from long 
and dangerous absences from home, or he fully with- 




Fig. 10. The Sea from Burial Hill, Plymouth. 



draws himself from gathering sea food, and makes his 
village, his home, and his skill with oar and sail min- 
ister to seekers of rest from the cities. 

Like the St. Lawrence country and the Carolinas, 
New England was discovered from the sea. For our 
present study it does not matter whether the Vikings 
came to this shore, or whether " Vinland " was their 
name for a part of southern New England. The 
real discoverers are more modern. Fifteen years 



SHORE-LINE AND HILLTOP IN NEW ENGLAND 59 

before the Pilgrims came, Champlain had sailed from 
the North and coasted along the shores ; he named 
Mount Desert and entered the Penobscot ; the peaks 
of the White Mountains caught his eye from the 
northwest, and rounding Cape Ann, he recognized a 
good harbor, where Gloucester now is, for he called 
it Beauport. Later he found safety in Plymouth 
Harbor, and doubling the greater cape, made his 
farthest south in Nauset Harbor. Three years earlier, 
Gosnold was exploring the southern shores and gave 
names to the Elizabeth Islands, Marthas Vineyard, 
and Cape Cod. 

When we study the first occupation and earliest 
migrations by New England colonists, the broad fact 
appears that drainage lines did not control. There 
are no such waves of movement up a river as we 
see along the Hudson and Mohawk. Had the May- 
flozver come to land in the mouth of the Connecticut 
River, the history might have been different ; but 
the lines of human movement were transverse rather 
than longitudinal. Plymouth, Boston, and Salem 
were natural points of approach, and there history 
begins. Roger Williams and his followers went 
across the low hills from the Massachusetts colonies 
and found a natural resting-place in the first great 
valley and at the head of Narragansett. The next 
wave of population crossed the low plateau to the 
westward and found the fertile lands of the Connecti- 
cut Valley ; beyond rose the Berkshire barrier, and 
life gathered along the river, clearings grew, towns 
rose, and there was a forecast of the home of men, 
of industry, and of education, which now lies between 



6o 



GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 




Long Island Sound 
and the north bor- 
der of Massachusetts. 
Here are at least six 
institutions of higher 
learning, a network of 
railways, mills without 
number, and scenery, 
not Alpine, but in its 
own way magnificent. 
Let one stand on 
Mount Holyoke and 
look into the geologic 
past; go far back in 
the record which lies 
about and below, and 
there will be a spa- 
cious gulf between 
lofty uplands on 
either hand and lead- 
ing down to the sea ; 
the tides go in and 
out, and streams bear 
in waste from east 
and west, — ancestors 
of the Westfield, 
Deerfield, and Chico- 
pee rivers. Curious 
reptiles throng the 
mud-flats when the 
tide is out and leave 
their tracks to be un- 



SHORE-LINE AND HILLTOP IN NEW ENGLAND 61 

covered in later times, and sometimes volcanic eruptions 
cover the muddy bottoms with sheets of lava. As time 
passes, the lands are elevated, the muds are hardened, 
the resulting shales and sandstones and sandwiched 
beds of lava are tipped to the eastward and south- 
eastward. Then the softer sands and shales are 
etched away by long processes of weathering and 
stream work, and the western edges of the thick, 
hard lavas form mountain ridges, the hanging hills of 
Meriden, or Mount Tom, steep and columnar on the 
west and sloping on the east. Curving to the east, 
where the Connecticut cuts the range, we have Mount 
Holyoke, which disappears southward from Amherst. 
The glacial ice, the glacial floods, the terraces, flood 
plains, and ox-bows of the river, — these represent the 
later history, leading to man's advent. 

The aborigines also regarded the Berkshires as a 
barrier, protecting them in some measure from the 
fiercer savages of the Long House. But as now, so 
then, the wall was not impassable, for sometimes the 
elders of the Iroquois came across to collect their 
tributes of wampum. The massacres of the valley 
mark its lowlands as then a border country, and from 
that time until late in the last century we have had a 
migrating frontier, something which belongs only to 
a young and expanding nation. 

The early colonists may well have felt surprise, if 
not dismay, at the severity of the winters that greeted 
them. They had come from a mild climate in latitude 
52 ; and here in latitude 42 , ten degrees nearer the 
equator, they met the keen cold and fierce changes of 
New England winter. We must not forget the dif- 



62 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

ferences, however, between north and south in this 
region. The Northmen might have found soft winter 
weather south of Cape Cod ; for even the waters show 
a difference of temperature, and bluefish and some 
other marine creatures abound south of the Cape and 
are absent from more northern seas. 

New England could not be the key of Eastern 
America in war. Her valleys do not lead to the 
heart of the continent, but northward into rugged 
lands by the St. Lawrence. On the west is a moun- 
tain barrier which has never been crossed by a large 
body of armed men. Causes that lay in the people, 
and not in their land, gave to New England the open- 
ing events of the American Revolution. In that first 
short act certain geographic features came into the 
settings of the stage. Among these were the drum- 
lins; such are Breed's Hill and Bunker Hill; and it 
was the modest heights of Dorchester whose fortifi- 
cation by Washington made Boston untenable for the 
enemy. After the latter withdrew to New York, New 
England was almost a stranger to military operations. 

We have already discovered some of the trends of 
New England life and have seen how they flow from 
her physiographic conditions. The decline of the 
old agriculture was inevitable and need not be re- 
gretted. The sons and daughters of the farmers 
have gone to the factory, to business in the cities, to 
the prairies. Boulder fences have fallen down, houses 
are deserted, and fields grown with saplings ; but 
population has increased, towns and cities are every- 
where, railways and trolley roads and better high- 
ways thread the country, and much of New England 



64 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

will become suburban. The forests tvill be fostered, 
and the willing immigrant will subdue again the 
farms that have not already become the summer 
homes of urban people. The decline of New Eng- 
land is temporary, and the hardships and losses be- 
long only to the period of transition. 

The center of cotton manufacture is shifting from 
New England to the South. In the southern Appala- 
chians and along the streams that flow from them, 
King Cotton will widen his sway from the fields of 
the Gulf plains. There is the cotton, the coal, the 
water-power, and the iron, and short hauls bring the 
one to the other. New England cotton mills cannot 
long meet such conditions as the rising South affords; 
but wool can take the place of cotton, and the shoes 
and brass and paper of New England will not 
suffer. 

If fishing has lost its relative place, and lumbering 
also, the stores of granite, marble, slate, and brown- 
stone are limitless, and the wealth of the cities pours 
into the mountains and along the shores, during the 
heat of summer and the bright days of autumn. We 
see the process of final adjustment to geographic 
conditions. There is stress in the changes, but 
higher development and a richer civilization in the 
end. 

" Man is what he eats ; " " Character is a function 
of latitude ; " " History is nothing more than an echo 
of the operation of geographic laws ; " such are 
some of the sweeping affirmations that have been 
made about man's relation to the earth. They are 
too strong, and sure to confuse rather than to guide. 



SHORE-LINE AND HILLTOP IN NEW ENGLAND 65 

That environment influences character need not be 
asserted ; but we cannot be sure in weighing this in- 
fluence. Did the lands about the North Sea shape 
Teutonic character from time immemorial? And 
were some of these Teutons transplanted to a similar 
geographic province in the New World only to have 
the type perfected ? But suppose the Puritan had 
gone not to New England but to Virginia. Would 
he not as easily have made the New England type of 
civilization in a more genial climate and with a more 
generous soil ? Thus may physical features find 
limits to their efficiency ; and none may so wisely 
recognize this as those who seek to trace the lines 
of physiographic control. The first New Englanders 
were picked men ; the average man did not leave the 
eastern shires of Britain, but those who would have 
founded a state anywhere. 

Now we may freely concede what nature has done, 
so far as we can read it, for New England life. If 
sturdy men could have been tempted to indolence, 
the short summers and rough fields left them no 
opportunity for such indulgence. Whether the cli- 
mate is more a breeder of sturdy constitutions, or of 
consumption, may be left an unanswered question ; 
but none can doubt that the geographic features of 
this province are pronounced and that they have 
colored all the life of her people, and have been in a 
large way the channel of its expression. We have 
seen how her works and days, her products and her 
industries, have hinged upon her shore-lines, her 
streams and waterfalls, her soils and forests. And 
beyond this, the garb, at least, of New England feel- 



66 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

ing and thought, is woven in the loom of her fields 
and skies. 

This we can trace in her literature. And yet we 
do not think that nature is a mere cloak, put on and 
off at will by the New England writers. The appre- 
ciation that we mean, whether found in her prose or 
verse, is essentially poetic. The best example of this 
is Emerson, a prose poet everywhere, and nowhere 
more truly than in his " Nature." If deepest sym- 
pathy with the outer world be our test, Emerson is 
the poet of New England. In the forest " is sanctity 
which shames our religions, and reality which dis- 
credits our heroes." "The mind loves its old home; 
as water to our thirst, so is the rock, the ground, to 
our eyes, and hands, and feet." "We nestle in 
nature and draw our living as parasites from her 
roots and grains." " The fall of snowflakes in a still 
air, the blowing of sleet over a wide sheet of water, 
the reflections of trees and flowers in glassy lakes, the 
crackling and sporting of hemlock in the flames, — 
these are the music and pictures of the most ancient 
religion." These are flash-lights upon New England, 
but her fields and woods and storms are deep with 
meaning. 

We may leave to the critics Emerson's rank in 
poetry, pass his faults of meter, and call him "a great 
man who wrote poetry " ; but this, at least, we shall 
find, — the transcendentalist was not lifted off his na- 
tive soil, and " the secret of the land was in the poet." 
None can mistake the coming of New England 
spring in May-day or feel himself in any other land 
when — 



SHORE-LINE AND HILLTOP IN NEW ENGLAND 67 

" Announced by all the trumpets of the sky, 
Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields, 
Seems nowhere to alight ; the whited air 
Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven." 

A poet of the prairies would scarcely personify the 
sea, thundering on its border : — 

" I drive my wedges home, 



nor would he seek the deep and rocky forest : — 

" The watercourses were my guide ; 
They led me through the thicket damp. 
Through brake and fern, the beaver's camp, 
Through beds of granite cut my road. 1 ' 

The physiographer has adopted Monadnock as the 
name of a typical form of land ; and here our poet 
has also found a song : — 

" Every morn I lift my head, 
See New England underspread 
Anchored fast for many an age, 
I await the bard and sage. 1 ' 

Less intuitional and prophetic, but more simple and 
full in his pictures of the New England country, is 
Whittier. His biographer has made him tell of his 
early suffering from the fierce winter cold ; and he has 
given us further proof of the tardy and difficult fashion 
in which the New England fathers adapted or failed 
to adapt themselves to a severer climate, " toughening 
themselves and their children sitting in cold churches, 
and deeming flannel garments no necessity." 



68 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

He, too, has immortalized the winter snows, but in 
a tale of domestic life, and tells of the uncle : — 

" Himself to Nature's heart so near 
That all her voices in his ear 
Of beast or bird had meanings clear.'" 

Whittier, too, has his : — 

" Monadnock lifting from his night of pines 
His rosy forehead to the evening star." 

He sees it from Wachusett, and here also draws a 
sweet story of human faithfulness. He could not, 
living on its banks, fail to touch the Merrimac with 
his fancy. Other rivers he had seen, the Potomac, 
the Hudson, and — 

" Have seen along his valley gleam 
The Mohawk's softly winding stream ; 
Yet wheresoe'er his step might be, 
Thy wandering child looked back to thee." 

To a blue water in New England belongs his 
" Summer by the Lakeside." Here is the same 
refuge in nature that we found in Bryant by the 
Hudson ; and in the closing lines we have a double 
picture, — the landscape and the deep seriousness of 
the old New England life. 

Thoreau was a poet also in keen vision and strong- 
lined reflection of his native fields and woods. His 
"Week on the Concord and Merrimac rivers" will 
surely leave one remembrance in the reader's mind, — 
the still, scarcely flowing waters of the lesser stream. 
He lived too soon and was too little systematic to 



SHORE-LINE AND HILLTOP IN NEW ENGLAND 69 

know or care that this little stream belongs to a group 
of north-flowing rivers in Massachusetts, or the "still 
rivers " of Connecticut, which are sluggish because, 
since their valleys were excavated, the lands have 
tilted a little to the south, impeding their flow, and 
sending with a rush to the sea their south-flowing 
neighbors. But Thoreau could see, with eyes often 
lacking to the geographer, deep into the mystic mean- 
ing of out-of-door New England, and he who would 
know the land should go with him, " half college 
graduate, half Algonquin, the Robinson Crusoe of 
Walden Pond," to his hut in the woods, or walk with 
him down the soft sands of Cape Cod to Province- 
town, or beneath the green arches of the Maine 
woods. 



CHAPTER III 

THE APPALACHIAN BARRIER 

We are still to view the stage on which the scenes 
of early American history were enacted. As with 
New England, we look out upon it from the sea. 
The floor of the stage is the Atlantic lowland. Be- 
hind it are painted the crags and woodland slopes of 
the Appalachian Mountains. But the foreground is 
not the same in the South as in the North : in New 
England it is worn mountain land, in the South it is 
coastal plain. The one is a country of hills, the other 
a land of smoother aspect, flat or gently rolling, 
and showing low platforms alternating with shallow 
stream valleys. In one the rocks are of fabulous age, 
toughened in fiber and gnarly in face. In the other 
they consist of scarcely cemented land waste spread 
out in even sheets, often bearing marine shells, and 
thus giving proof of their recent emergence out of 
the sea. These beds of sand, gravel, marl, and clay 
slant gently toward the sea border and continue far 
beneath its waters, as would appear if we could re- 
move the covering waves and dig valleys to reveal 
the structure. If the eastern part of our continent 
should come up a hundred feet, there would only be 
more of this flat country. And if it should go down 
a hundred feet, the ocean would only be conquering 
again a part of its former domain. Such a coastal 

70 



THE APPALACHIAN BARRIER 71 

plain is not alone a feature of our land but borders 
parts of many continents. And in central New York 
or Wisconsin the geologist finds proofs of ancient 
coastal plains, now lifted and roughened beyond rec- 
ognition, except to the initiated. 

In typical form this lowland does not begin until 
we go south of New York Harbor and enter New 
Jersey. Of that state it makes the central and south- 
ern parts. Then it includes all of Delaware and 
most of Maryland, except where the latter state 
reaches a long and slender arm out across the ridges 
and valleys of the Appalachians. And here are all 
the low-lying, plantations of Virginia, alone rivaling 
New England in its harvests of colonial record and 
tradition. Going south, we find it still, a hundred 
miles or more in width in North Carolina ; and at this 
distance from the sea it has attained a height of but 
three hundred feet, or a little more, above the ocean 
level. The rivers are tidal far within the shore-line, and 
merge into sounds, as Albemarle and Pamlico. Out- 
side of the sounds are long barrier beaches, theaters 
of wave and wind, protecting the waters within, and 
opening here and there for communication with the 
outer seas. So flat are parts of the coastal plain that 
" the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad has a stretch 
of 40 miles, where there is neither curve, excavation, 
nor embankment." 

South Carolina tells the same story, only the coastal 
plain is wider, about 150 miles. So low and fiat is 
this region that swamps abound, especially along the 
streams and shore-line. The alligators are at home 
in the rivers, and the names of the forest trees have 



72 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

a tropical sound. The old story of tidal rivers is 
told again, and the towns — Charleston, Port Royal, 
Beaufort — remind one in this respect, at least, of 
New London, New York, or Philadelphia. 

The mountains do not rise at once from the plain. 
Lying between, in Maryland, Virginia, and the Caro- 
linas, is a belt of hilly country, a little more than plain 
in some parts and a little less than mountain in others. 
In North Carolina this strip is two hundred miles wide, 
and begins to rise abruptly from the coastal plain on 
the east. Falls, or swift reaches, amounting to two 
hundred feet of descent, mark the eastward passages 
of the streams across this boundary, which physiog- 
raphers have long called the Fall Line. The line 
runs southward into Georgia and northward to the 
Delaware. Up to this limit on the east, the rivers 
are sluggish, if not tidal. Down to this limit on the 
west, they are swift of flow. The hilly belt has also 
its physiographic name, — it is the Piedmont region, 
lying at the foot of the Blue Ridge. It is well-worn 
mountain land and is much like southeastern New 
England. If we could lift the New England region 
and expose her sea bottom it would be like the South 
Atlantic country ; it would have a coastal plain, a Pied- 
mont region, and its mountain ranges. 

"Tide-water" Virginia and Maryland lie between 
the Fall Line and the sea. Within this region is 
the Chesapeake with its tributary waters. As in 
Maine, or on the Narragansett, or the Hudson, we 
are dealing now with a "drowned" river system. 
Perhaps the Chesapeake is the finest example, and 
on any map it looks like a swollen river with over- 



74 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

widened branches. Raise the land, and see how the 
salt waters would retire, and how the Potomac, York, 
and James would join the lengthened Susquehanna 
and enter the Atlantic somewhere to the east of Nor- 
folk. But things were as they are long before the 
memory of man ; and when the early navigators en- 
tered the gateway of Cape Charles and Cape Henry, 
a wilderness of quiet waters was before them, and 
they could make long voyages within sight of green 
shores, and for hundreds of miles thread narrow, tidal 
inlets shadowed by the overhanging forests. Captain 
John Smith gave the summer of 1608 to such voy- 
ages of exploration, going up the bay and enter- 
ing the Susquehanna, Patapsco, and Potomac rivers. 
" Chesapeake Bay is a bay in most respects scarce 
to be outdone by the universe, having so many large 
and spacious rivers, spreading themselves to immeas- 
urable creeks and coves, admirably carved out and 
contrived by the omnipotent hand of our wise Creator, 
for the advantage and conveniency of its inhabit- 
ants." Good as this is, Fiske, who quotes the above 
from an old writer, has drawn a picture in yet stronger 
lines. "The country known as 'tidewater Virginia' 
is a kind of sylvan Venice. Into the depths of the 
shaggy woodland, for many miles on either side of 
the great bay, the salt tide ebbs and flows. One can 
go surprisingly far inland on seafaring craft, while 
with a boat there are but few plantations on the old 
York peninsula to which one cannot approach very 
near." So easy and convenient were these ready- 
made highways as to retard the making of roadways 
across the lands and through the woods. 



THE APPALACHIAN BARRIER 75 

No single influence molded the life of the colony 
of Virginia. The beginnings in a wilderness are 
never easy. But this was no such land to struggle 
with as the Puritan found. Its climate was genial, 
its virgin soils were rich, and the battle with the 
winter's cold did not consume the energies that were 
sorely needed in other ways. If there had been no 
other differences, tobacco was enough. The world 
was calling for the new-found weed. The soils were 
suited to it. It was good currency when there was 
little other, and it was raised in fields that were 
washed by navigable waters. Direct to many planta- 
tions came the ships that loaded it for London. Or, 
if not, it was small trouble to raft it down the more 
shallow inlets to wharves that ocean-going sails could 
reach. 

Plantations developed rather than towns. The 
prevalence of tobacco, the introduction of slave labor, 
the absence of land roads, and the facility of the 
waterways, — all favored the scattered, rural life. But 
no more here than in New England are geographic 
causes all ; for the Cavalier, and not the Puritan, 
came to Virginia. The one was proud, given to 
amusement, an aristocrat, building a mansion, and 
surrounding himself with a landed estate like those 
of his native England. The other worked with his 
hands, had Yankee curiosity and invention, was 
frugal, and lived with his fellows in towns or on 
small neighborly farms. Each could understand the 
other's defects better than he could his points of ex- 
cellence ; and these two unlike men came into singu- 
larly contrasting environments to found a home across 



76 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

the seas. Where the two lived were the two foci of 
colonial history, and the causes of the unfolding 
might baffle a complete analysis, either by the geog- 
rapher or the historian. 

Such is a glimpse of the tide-water country, the 
coastal plain. We must have such a view that we 
may know the meaning of the barrier that looms be- 
hind. Not all the lowland life is rural, though coun- 
try is more than city as one goes farther south. But 
at the inner edge of the coastal plain, at the head 
of navigation, close by water-power, at the Fall Line, 
— here cities could but grow. Here, then, is the sea- 
board rival of New York, seated by the estuary of 
the Delaware. And here is the fourth of the great 
Atlantic quartette of cities, on the Chesapeake. And 
then come Washington, below the falls of the Poto- 
mac, Fredericksburg, Richmond, and Petersburg in 
Virginia, and Raleigh, Camden, and Columbia in the 
Carolinas. Narrow lowlands everywhere, and cities 
grown up by the side of short, tidal rivers, — such is 
the Atlantic border of the United States. 

The barrier itself is not a single elevation, nor is it 
a disorderly group of heights, but has, as all moun- 
tain systems have, a plan that can be analyzed. It is 
indeed a mountain system. The shortest description 
of it is that it consists of parallel ridges and valleys 
which, as a group, but not as individuals, reach from 
eastern New York into Alabama. As in New Eng- 
land, so here, the downwear has been great. The 
ridges are not in relief because they have been ele- 
vated relatively to the valley bottoms, but because the 
valleys have been dug between them. 



THE APPALACHIAN BARRIER 77 

These very general statements will be clear if we 
look more specially at the barrier in three regions, — 
first in Pennsylvania, then in Virginia, and finally in 
North Carolina and Tennessee. We will note the 
elements in a profile of the country seen by one who 
goes from Philadelphia to Erie or Pittsburg. We 
go across the lowlands to Harrisburg. Here we are 
in a broad and fertile valley which runs far to 
northeast and to southwest. In New York it is 
the Wallkill Valley. In Pennsylvania, Easton, Beth- 
lehem, Allentown, Reading, Lebanon, Harrisburg, 
Carlisle, and Chambersburg lie in it. Toward the 
Maryland line it is called the Cumberland Valley. 
In Maryland, Hagerstown is in it, and in Virginia it 
is the Shenandoah Valley. It is not the trench of a 
master river ; for the rivers commonly flow across 
and not through it. It is often a dozen miles or more 
wide. It is due to the etching out of softer shales 
and limestones, leaving harder masses on either hand 
as mountains. Because the rocks are shales and 
limestones, the soils are rich, the farms are produc- 
tive, towns are many, and railways cross and thread 
the valley everywhere. Physiographers know it as 
the Appalachian Valley. 

To call it a valley will not puzzle the traveler who 
looks north from Allentown or Harrisburg. The even 
crest of Blue Mountain follows the horizon as far as 
he can see, ranging from twelve hundred to nearly two 
thousand feet above the ocean. On the southeast the 
mountain range that should bound the valley is in 
places worn away, but it appears in South Mountain, 
east of Chambersburg. It is worth our while to remem- 



y8 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

ber this name, for this modest elevation grows and rises 
southward until it becomes the Blue Ridge, and at 
last includes the strong and lofty mountain masses of 
the Carolinas. To the northeast it reappears again 
also, and becomes the Highlands of New Jersey, and 
the Highland Range of New York, cut by the Hud- 
son. If even this were all, we should not have a 
barrier of historic importance. But, returning now to 
Pennsylvania, beyond the Blue Mountain are other 
ridges like itself, following it in long parallel walls, 
and separated from each other by longitudinal valleys. 
As a rule, the small streams run along these valleys and 
enter at right angles larger rivers which cut boldly 
across or through the mountains. Such are the Dela- 
ware, Lehigh, Schuylkill, and Susquehanna. Some- 
times a large stream runs between ridges, as the east 
branch of the Susquehanna from Scranton to Nor- 
thumberland, or the west branch past Williamsport. 
Such an arrangement of streams gives a rectangular 
or trellised pattern to the drainage. How it comes to 
be so is too long a story to be told here. 

The Susquehanna crosses all the ridges. Why, 
then, is not its valley as good a doorway to the in- 
terior as the Hudson offers ? Because the river is 
shallow, and beyond the mountains its head waters 
fringe out and are lost in the heights of the Alleghany 
plateau. To this we must turn to try to correct a 
most persistent misunderstanding about the land 
forms of Pennsylvania. Here are meant the unnum- 
bered references to the " Alleghany Mountains," as 
though there was, in Pennsylvania, a range of that 
name, rugged, and thousands of feet in height. 



80 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

From near Williamsport, far to the southwest, runs 
the Bald Eagle Valley. It is narrow and slightly 
curved to the southeast. On this southeast side it 
is flanked by a mountain ridge. The rocks are dis- 
turbed and tilted, and it is in all respects like the 
other ridges of the region. On the northwest rises 
a wall of equal height, about one thousand feet from 
the bed of the stream, but the rocks in it are not 
disturbed ; they are piled one on the other in hori- 
zontal beds. This great wall, or escarpment, is made 
rugged by weathering and gashed by ravines. Fol- 
low up one of these and we come, not upon a moun- 
tain crest, but upon the eastern edge of the plateau 
which makes western Pennsylvania a surface about 
two thousand feet above sea, only lower in its valleys 
and where, at the northwest, it slopes down to Lake 
Erie. The " Alleghany Mountains " are nothing but 
this rough and steep wall that faces the southeast, 
and it seemed like another mountain range to those 
that came to it from the seaboard. If we follow the 
Alleghany escarpment northeast, it becomes obscure 
in that part of Pennsylvania, but reappears in New 
York, where it is known as the Catskills. Neither 
Catskill nor Alleghany, therefore, is the name of 
real mountains, but both, of the edge of a plateau, 
and the drainage, not being controlled by upturned 
beds of rock, is arranged like the branches of a tree. 
If we follow the Alleghany front southeast, we shall 
find it in West Virginia, Virginia, and Tennessee ; and 
here again this long wall, facing southeast, has long 
been called the Cumberland Mountains, but ought to 
be called, and is becoming known as, the Cumberland 



THE APPALACHIAN BARRIER 8 1 

escarpment. If the reader will remember that this 
wall, whether it be steep slope or sheer cliff, extends 
from the Hudson River into Alabama; that the rocks 
are horizontal and form a plateau back of it, while all 
the proper mountains of the Atlantic seaboard are 
southeast of it, — he will have a key to the form and 
structure of the Appalachian region. 

Returning for a moment to Pennsylvania, the bar- 
rier embraces South Mountain, the ridges from Blue 
Mountain to Bald Eagle Valley, the Alleghany es- 
carpment, and the uplands of western Pennsylvania. 
The meaning of it will be somewhat appreciated if 
the path of the Pennsylvania Railroad be carefully 
traced from Philadelphia to Pittsburg. 

Let us place ourselves at Harpers Ferry in Virginia. 
A river flows by us to the southeast. It is north of 
the town and is the Potomac. Barely east of the vil- 
lage it passes through a gorge, and in two miles comes 
out upon lowlands again. It has passed the Blue 
Ridge, whose severed heights rise in strong slopes 
nearly a thousand feet on either hand. Harpers 
Ferry is barely within the Blue Ridge on the west. 
From the southwest another river flows along the 
western base of the Blue Ridge and joins the Poto- 
mac at the east end of the town, which lies in the 
fork. It is the Shenandoah, and this is the Shenan- 
doah Valley. To the north and east we should cross 
Maryland and come up to Harrisburg. To the south- 
west we should follow a broad and rich vale to the 
head waters of the Shenandoah beyond Staunton. It 
is a part again of the Appalachian Valley. As in 
Pennsylvania, it has towns, railroads, and fertile fields, 



82 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

and the Potomac, like the Susquehanna, crosses it. 
Like the Susquehanna, too, it gathers its waters in 
longitudinal streams among the mountain ridges, and, 
turning, crosses them and the Shenandoah Valley 
to the southeast. Unlike the Susquehanna, however, 
the Potomac does not gather tribute from far over 
the plateau, for there the Monongahela holds sway. 



Fig. 15. Characteristic Forested Slopes in the Southern Appalachians. 
Linville Gorge. 

The great barrier, then, in Virginia, is the Blue 
Ridge, the Appalachian ridges, the Alleghany es- 
carpment, and the plateau, and we may appreciate it 
by tracing again the line of a railway, the Baltimore 
and Ohio, which, like the Pennsylvania, starts on a 
tidal bay, crosses the Atlantic lowlands, the several 
parts of the Appalachian barrier, and comes down 
into the Ohio Valley. 

Let us place ourselves at Knoxville in Tennessee. 



THE APPALACHIAN BARRIER 83 

A few miles to the southeast bold mountains rise 
and lie well over into North Carolina. It is a rudely 
triangular tangle of ridges, peaks, and high, inter- 
montane valleys. More peaks than can be counted 
on the fingers of a hand rise above six thousand feet, 
and Mount Mitchell passes that limit by more than 
seven hundred feet. It is more than four hundred 
feet loftier than Mount Washington, and is the high- 
est point of the United States east of the Rocky 
Mountains. These heights are built of the ancient 
crystalline rocks and are the southern continuation 
of the Blue Ridge. But the ridge so easily passed 
by the Potomac River has become a geographical 
province, broad and high. Locally the name Blue 
Ridge is used of the eastern range of the group, and 
the western range is the Unakas, and here are the 
loftiest peaks. But both together and all between 
connect through Virginia with the old New York 
Highlands. Atmospheric effects tell their story 
here, for in the distance the ridge is "Blue," and in 
poem and story, as in the common speech, the Una- 
kas become the Great Smoky Mountains. 

But not forgetting that we are at Knoxville, we 
travel to the northwest a few miles, and we are at the 
foot of the Cumberland escarpment. We may climb 
it and wander across the upland and come down to 
Nashville or into Kentucky. If we follow the foot 
of the wall north to the Tennessee-Kentucky line, we 
can ascend to the uplands through the historic Cum- 
berland Gap. 

Up and down the great valley past Knoxville 
extend the Appalachian ridges, but they are not so 



84 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

high or persistent as in Pennsylvania. Going be- 
tween some of these ridges to the north, we may 
follow the Holston or Clinch rivers to their head 
waters in Virginia. To the southwest we go down 
the Tennessee. At Chattanooga the river leaves the 
valley and winds through a trench in the plateau, 
later to make its curious swing to the north and to 
the Ohio. But if we pass Chattanooga and Lookout 
Mountain on our right, we shall be still in a broad 
valley, whose walls begin to fade, and we come upon 
the waters of the Coosa, which would take us south- 
ward to the Gulf. 

The Clinch and Holston do not alone contribute to 
the trunk river. These follow longitudinal valleys ; 
but from the southeast, out of the mountains, come 
most of the waters of Hiwassee, Little Tennessee, 
and the French Broad. And these streams reach 
across the higher Unakas far to the east, and bring 
the waters from the Blue Ridge as well. Taking the 
Tennessee system, therefore, even with the important 
longitudinal flow above and below Knoxville, its gen- 
eral flow is westward, like the Kanawha farther north. 
The southern Appalachians have westward drainage. 
The northern Appalachians drain eastward. 

In the South the barrier consists of crystalline 
mountains, ancient and massive, a series of ridges 
alternating with valleys, an escarpment, and a pla- 
teau. Comparing the north, middle, and south parts, 
the general profile is the same, but there are many 
differences. The Blue Ridge is worn out opposite 
Harrisburg, it is conspicuous at Harpers Ferry, it is 
high and wide in the south. The younger but yet 




FIG. 16. Spruce Forest near the Summit of White Top Mountain, 
Virginia. Photograph by U.S. Bureau of Forestry. 



86 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

ancient ridges between the Blue Ridge and the pla- 
teau are high and persistent in Pennsylvania and 
Virginia, but weaken at Knoxville and disappear 
southward. It may yet be added that the long, wide 
belt of ridge and valley land between the Blue 
Ridge and the Alleghany-Cumberland escarpment 
is known to physiographers as the " Greater Appala- 
chian Valley." 

We have dwelt upon the physiographic aspects 
of the Appalachian region because they are usually 
left by historical writers to the reader's imagination. 
Those writers, unfortunately, do not all have Park- 
man's appreciation of geographic setting or the artis- 
tic skill with which he makes pictures of the land rise 
in perspective and color out of his pages. 

This great rampart of the East does not seem diffi- 
cult now, when the forests have been so largely cut 
away, when engineers have found reasonable grades 
for steam passage, and when electricity bids defiance 
to grades of every degree. But the greatest influence 
of the barrier goes back to the time when the forest 
was everywhere, when the wilderness was nearly un- 
known, and when even a country highway belonged to 
the future. The explorer, finding a gap, might encoun- 
ter another mountain in front of him, for the ridges 
often "break joints," like bricks in a wall. And if he 
hit on the Susquehanna or the Potomac, it would lead 
him to the mazy wilderness of the Alleghany plateau. 
In addition to the physical difficulties of entering the 
mountain belt from the Atlantic plain, the pioneer 
must be ready for the prowling savage and count on 
the hostility of the French garrisons as he neared 



THE APPALACHIAN BARRIER g? 

the Ohio River. Only the adventurer, or the man 
with a serious public errand, would be likely to leave 
the fertile fields of Penn's country, or the tidal low- 
lands of the Chesapeake, for the hard trails and 
doubtful goals of the Appalachian wilderness. It 
has required more than two centuries to clear the 
forests, lay the roads, and open the regions fully 
to civilized man. Even down to 1880, there was a 
stretch of 350 miles, from the Roanoke southward, 
that had never been crossed by a railway. 

If, without a mountain barrier, the Atlantic plains 
had merged into a land like the prairies, it would be 
hard to say how American history would have shaped 
itself. If the fierce aborigines of the Southwest and 
the Northwest had been in the same relative positions, 
the new colonies would have been for them a more 
easy prey. And the colonists would have scattered, 
seeking the best lands, tending to individual rather 
than community life. This, in a medley population 
drawn from all the nations of Northwestern Europe, 
would have kept civilization back, and deferred the 
founding of coherent states. But the new Americans 
were pressed between the sea and the base of the 
mountains, forced to be neighborly, to assimilate each 
other's ideas, provide for common defense, and build 
up common institutions. Kept on the sea border, 
the centers of life were maritime, and there was, for 
those old days of slow-going ships, active interchange 
of ideas and products between the Old World and 
the New. The education of the mountains and forest 
came later. Now the people were held somewhat to 
their ancestral tutor, — the wide sea. 



88 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

If the unity thus enforced was useful, so also was 
the diversity fostered by physical conditions. The 
Atlantic strip of colonial land was cold-temperate 
at the north and subtropical at the south. Boston 
and Charleston could not be the same. And almost 
every colony had a natural home differentiating it 
from the rest. Massachusetts Bay, Narragansett, 
Hudson, Delaware, Chesapeake, — these need no 
comment. With Roundhead, Dutchman, Quaker, 
Romanist, and Cavalier, other diversities came in, 
and came in so strongly that final unity for the colo- 
nies was by no means to be taken for granted. There 
was portentous uncertainty as to how New York and 
Pennsylvania would go in the Revolution. But the 
barrier held the colonies together in the first flush 
of individualism, when, escaping one yoke, they were 
unduly afraid of putting their heads into another. 
It has been said that even in 1700, barely three- 
fourths of a century after American ground began 
to be occupied in New England and Virginia, one 
could go from Portland to the Potomac and sleep 
every night in a " considerable village." The people 
had to live close enough to each other to insure 
organic life for each of the colonies, and in the end, 
for all, moving surely on to what Fiske calls a " con- 
tinental state of things." 

No English settlements had been made beyond 
the central and southern Appalachians at the begin- 
ning of the Revolution. A century and a half had 
been spent in building the states by the Atlantic. 
Thirty years later the president of the Republic 
would send Lewis and Clark to the mouth of the 



THE APPALACHIAN BARRIER 89 

Columbia River. Within eighty years a half-dozen 
railway surveys would be run from the Mississippi 
River to the Pacific Ocean. In a century and a 
quarter great cities would stand by the Golden Gate 
and by the bays of the Northwest. The public men 
of the colonies did not much appreciate the country 
beyond the mountains. But we need not wonder, 
for it was to them unknown. They had, indeed, 
heard of the Lakes and the French forts, and may 
have served in frontier wars, but they never dreamed 
that the destinies of the nation were there. There 
were exceptional men who saw more than others. 
Such was Spotswood of Virginia, who, in 17 16, 
crossed the Blue Ridge in central Virginia, and thus 
wrote, " We should attempt to make some settle- 
ments on y e lakes, and at the same time possess our- 
selves of those passes of the great mountains, which 
are necessary to preserve a communication with such 
settlements." 

This was the call of a clear trumpet, but no one 
was aroused by it. The Virginia colonists had too 
much to do and to be interested in nearer home, and 
two generations were to pass before there would be 
a nation. It was not the fault of the colonists that 
when they awoke to it they did not find another 
great nation across the mountains. Great movements 
work out in the silent chemistry of events. Neither 
individuals nor peoples plan their greatest deeds. 
This has nowhere been more true than in " the win- 
ning of the West." 

How the Appalachian barrier was crossed, we must 
now inquire. Most physiographers think that an 



QO GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

ancient river system had its head waters in West 
Virginia, its middle course in Pennsylvania, and dis- 
charged into a great valley, where Lake Erie now 
lies. By the strange changes of the ice invasion, 
the system was so broken up and rearranged that 
two broad streams, the Allegheny from the north, 
and the Monongahela from the south, coming together 
at a sharp angle, form the Ohio, and carry many 
waters of West Virginia and southwestern New 
York to the Gulf of Mexico. Covering the narrow 
point between the rivers, and stretching along their 
banks and eastward over the uplands, is Pittsburg, 
the "Gateway of the West." Washington had 
prophetic visions of the meaning of this place, but 
the French were too strong. Fort Duquesne, Brad- 
dock, Fort Pitt, — these are the early chapters. A 
permanent settlement was made in 1773, and the 
tides of life began to flow. A million people now 
belong to the city and its environs. No more power- 
ful geographic causes can be found in any land 
than group themselves here, — navigation on three 
rivers, valleys inviting railways, and mineral products 
close at hand, making this the North American 
metropolis of petroleum, of natural gas, of bituminous 
coal, and of iron. 

But we wish most to see how the overflow from 
the East centered upon Pittsburg and passed down 
the Ohio River. From the head of the Delaware 
and Chesapeake bays paths were sought between 
the Potomac and the upper waters of the Susque- 
hanna, or in the belt of country now lying between 
the Pennsylvania and the Baltimore and Ohio Rail- 



Q2 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

ways. Such paths must lead across the Hagerstown- 
Harrisburg Valley, across the Appalachian ridges, 
and over the plateau east of the Monongahela River. 
But there is no natural highway. The Mohawk 
route was a steady menace to the trade of Philadel- 
phia during the early decades of the nineteenth cen- 
tury. An Albany firm, as told by McMaster, owned 
a Hudson River line of packets, and offered to carry 
freight from New York to Pittsburg for six dollars a 
ton, while wagon lines from Philadelphia, with tire- 
some efforts, could scarcely meet the price. To go 
around and come down the Allegheny River, or up 
the streams from Lake Erie, was easier than to come 
over the barrier. The New Yorkers, at the same 
time, insured the goods and gave easier terms of 
payment. Thus they held the advantage and looked 
forward to even better days, for the Erie Canal was 
under way. 

The men of Philadelphia in those days thought 
that they held the geographic key to the inland 
trade. By one scheme they would go on rivers, lakes, 
and short canals, by Elmira and Seneca Lake, to 
Lake Ontario. Or they were going by the Susque- 
hanna to the Allegheny, the Conewango, and Lake 
Erie, or by the Juniata to the Allegheny and the 
Ohio. But why wonder that they saw visions of 
fleets on shallow rivers and obscure creeks, when 
Washington himself had visited, years before, the 
Oneida carrying-place, and had considered the pass 
from Otsego Lake to the Mohawk, and had grown 
eloquent upon the navigable waters of central New 
York. 



94 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

While New York and Philadelphia strove, danger 
for both loomed in the far Southwest. Would not 
the farmers and traders of the new West send their 
goods to New Orleans ? What was to prevent the 
Southern town, lying between the prairies and the sea, 
from winning in the race ? Sugar and cotton had 
already come to the seaboard by way of Pittsburg. 
Thus the call grew loud for roads and canals across 
the mountains; and the statesmen joined in, for they 
said, we cannot form into a compact nation lands 
that are divorced in trade and have scant intercourse 
with each other. " State after state heard the cry, 
and an era of internal improvements opened, which 
did far more to cement the Union and join the East 
and West inseparably than did the Constitution and 
the laws." 1 

That the old roadways from Philadelphia and the 
Chesapeake country to the Ohio River were so vari- 
ous shows that nature offered no commanding route. 
There was a northern highway, if we may so dignify 
it, leading from Philadelphia almost directly westward. 
It ran at no great distance from the future field of 
Gettysburg, crossed the Appalachian Valley at Ship- 
penburg, passed out of the mountain belt beyond 
Bedford, and, bearing more to the north, led down 
into the muddy hamlet of Pittsburg ; but in the years 
following the Revolution it guided multitudes to the 
west. The other routes were farther south, and led 
along the Potomac in western Maryland, then up into 
Pennsylvania to the Youghiogheny, and down by this 
river and the Monongahela to Pittsburg. Such were 

1 McMaster, " History of the People of the United States," IV, 397. 



p 


[ 


. ■? -J 

' ri A: ■ ' tfi " : <v 

I'li '■-■"& ■ ' H 

; if f v 







96 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

Washington's road and Braddock's road, which often 
followed a still older Indian trail. Washington, too, 
was watching New Orleans, and was anxious to tap 
the Ohio Valley for the Potomac and the James. For 
this a road across the mountains was needed, a true 
highway, and not the difficult path which he himself 
had so often trod. Not long after his death the na- 
tional government undertook the building of the Cum- 
berland Road. We have described its general course, 
and often it was identical with the roads that Washing- 
ton had known. It was opened in 1818 ; and in a few 
years more the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal was fin- 
ished, doing thus what was possible to concentrate the 
streams of commerce and immigration in this region. 

Thus along many lines, in Virginia, Maryland, and 
Pennsylvania, the westward migration went on. The 
mountains were like a sieve, with openings enough, 
though small ; and everything that went through cen- 
tered, as if in a funnel, in the upper Ohio Valley. 
Here, as we have seen, was Pittsburg, which had be- 
come a city a few years before the Cumberland Road 
was finished. She had already begun to dig the coal 
from her neighboring hills and drive her smoking fur- 
naces. The puff of the steam whistle was heard on 
the waters of the Ohio, and goods and men went 
down the valley as freely as did the waters gathered 
from the Alleghany plateau. But multitudes had not 
waited for steam. They had been going for a gene- 
ration, from the close of the Revolution, in canoes, 
scows, and on rafts, bound for Kentucky or the settle- 
ments north of the Ohio. 

We have now seen how the white man went west- 



THE APPALACHIAN BARRIER 97 

ward by the Mohawk Valley. How great this avenue 
was will appear again when we follow the shores of 
the Great Lakes and look out over the prairies. We 
have seen, too, that the Ohio Valley was a door to the 
West ; but we have yet to follow another stream of 
migration along natural highways that open farther 
to the south. Through these highways went the men 
who founded Kentucky and Tennessee and shaped 
the destinies of the Southwest. 

We may now recall the longitudinal valleys of the 
Appalachians, of which the greatest is that which leads 
by Harrisburg and Hagerstown up the Shenandoah. 
When the early settlers had occupied these fertile 
lands in Pennsylvania, and the stream of life must 
flow farther, it was easier to follow the valleys to the 
southwest than to cross the ranges and to come out 
on the west. Hence before the rush toward Pittsburg 
began, there had been for many decades a longitudinal 
movement into Virginia, and then beyond to the head 
waters of the Tennessee, the Watauga, the Holston, 
and the French Broad. Among those who thus went 
southwest were the Scotch-Irish, a people to whom 
American historians are now beginning to render 
justice. In great numbers these people, English in 
speech, Scotch in blood, Irish by adoption, Presby- 
terian in faith, came to America. Philadelphia and 
the Pennsylvania lowlands were full of them. Prince- 
ton University is their memorial in New Jersey. They 
entered the Appalachian valleys, largely populated 
West Virginia, and were the backbone of the young 
commonwealth that sprang up on the Tennessee and 
the Cumberland. " They formed the kernel of the 



98 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

distinctively and intensely American stock who were 
the pioneers of our people in their march westward, 
the vanguard of the army of fighting settlers who, with 
ax and rifle, won their way from the Alleghanies to 
the Rio Grande and the Pacific." 1 

Southwestern Virginia lies for a hundred miles along 
the northern boundary of Tennessee. This boundary 
is purely arbitrary, for the valleys, the mountain ridges, 
and the streams cross it. In one of the valleys runs 
the Norfolk and Western Railway, leading up to 
Roanoke, and thence east, across the Blue Ridge, 
to the sea, or one may continue northeast through the 
Shenandoah Valley. The head waters of the Holston 
are in Virginia. We must remember that what is now 
Tennessee was in early days a part of North Caro- 
lina, an ultramontane country. Now we can under- 
stand how the backwoodsmen of Virginia went down 
the Holston, built their cabins, girdled the big trees, 
felled the little ones, planted corn, fought the savages, 
and thought they were still in Virginia. When they 
learned their mistake, they sought to be taken under 
the wing of the North Carolina government ; and their 
wish was granted, perhaps with reluctance, for they 
had a name worse than their deserts. They were the 
makers of a new commonwealth ; they had wives to 
support ; they had no time to wear gloves or to con- 
sume in deciding what to do with Tories who stirred 
up the red men. Thus they founded the Holston, or, 
as sometimes called, the Watauga settlements, one of 
the two early seed grounds of the state of Tennessee. 

The Holston community was also the nursery for 

1 Theodore Roosevelt, "Winning of the West," I, 134. 



THE APPALACHIAN BARRIER 99 

another commonwealth, long to anticipate Tennessee 
in becoming a member of the Union, — the state of 
Kentucky. On the north this state has a natural 
boundary, the Ohio River. On the south she is geo- 
graphically one with Tennessee ; and the Cumberland 
River, rising in the more northern state, passes south 
of the boundary by a long bend, and returns again 
toward the Ohio River. If the two form a single 
province, their history likewise begins with the same 
people, the same fierce battles with savages, the same 
heroic endurance of a wilderness more remote than 
other American colonists had known. To the settle- 
ments on the Atlantic, Europe was almost neighborly 
in comparison. 

The eastern boundary of Kentucky, for a consider- 
able distance, is formed by the Cumberland escarp- 
ment. Eastern Kentucky is plateau, and it overlooks 
the valleys of Virginia. Just where the three states 
now come together — Virginia, North Carolina, and 
Tennessee — is one of the most famous points in 
early American history. There is a break in the 
escarpment, — it is the Cumberland Gap. By it, in 
1775, Daniel Boone and his companions climbed out 
of the Appalachian Valley from the settlements on 
the Holston and began to blaze an equally famous 
highway, — the Wilderness Road. They pushed their 
way through the forest, had a preliminary skirmish 
or two with the red men, and founded the state ot 
Kentucky. Having carried the American frontier 
well down upon the Ohio River on the very eve of 
the Revolution, the ground was American at its close, 
and was the outpost of freedom in the struggle for the 
L.ofC. 



100 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

West that followed. Boone was more than a hunter ; 
he was one of the builders of a new nation. 

By the close of the war the new colony was well 
established. It is not within our purpose to describe 
its growth or character, but rather to follow the strong 
lines drawn by nature, along which the migrating 
hosts passed. For hosts they were, when the cessa- 
tion of hostilities left the people free to turn to the 
pursuits of peace. Then a never ending procession 
of boats floated down the Ohio from Pittsburg, and 
a perpetual caravan of men, women, and children, of 
packhorses and cattle, filed under the rocky cliffs 
of the Cumberland Gap and followed the blazed trees 
and now worn path of the Wilderness Road. In 
1769, six years before he planted the permanent 
settlement, Boone had made his first journey through 
this gap to the valley of the Kentucky River. He 
was returning, therefore, to a land which he knew, a 
land whose richness and beauty has won all behold- 
ers from that day to this. Open prairie and shaded 
woodland were there then as they are to-day. But 
there were uncounted buffalo also, and elk and deer, 
as well as wild creatures of fiercer kinds. In a few 
years the buffalo ceased to visit the salt licks, and 
the settlers came and availed themselves of the salt, 
— a product that in those days had to be carried far 
and was costly. It is not her grains and fruits that 
distinguish Kentucky from other states, but the 
meadows and pastures of the " Blue-grass region." 
Says Professor Garman, writing in an agricultural bul- 
letin, " The phrase, ' down in Old Kentucky,' con- 
veys to the wandering Kentuckian a picture in which 



102 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

are sunny slopes of soft, green grass ; grazing horses 
and cattle, sleek and beautiful. . . . Blue-grass Ken- 
tucky is a delightful bit of the world in May and 
June. . . . And it is largely the result of the pro- 
fusion with which the little plant, blue-grass, grows 
in her limestone soil." The same writer proceeds to 
say that a bulletin on forage plants would be little 
needed if all Kentucky were like this favored fifth 
around Lexington. The student will find no better 
illustration of geographic control — agricultural, so- 
cial, and even political — than this famous region. 

The reader of " In the Tennessee Mountains," or 
of "The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains," 
finds true pictures of the forests and hazy mountain 
slopes of the southern Appalachians. But he finds 
also a human type not to be met elsewhere in the 
United States. He is farmer, hunter, blacksmith, 
shopkeeper, or rude preacher. He is courageous, 
original, reads the sky and forest in lieu of books, 
and is little troubled by the outside world. He could 
not raise cotton, he did not own slaves, and his sym- 
pathies were with the North rather than with the South 
in the Civil War. His family lives as his great-grand- 
father's family lived, for change is almost unknown. 
Division of labor has little place in such a society, 
where homespun still prevails. These men are the 
descendants of the backwoodsmen, who came from 
the Old World, from Pennsylvania, from Virginia, and 
the Carolinas, to the Holston, the French Broad, the 
Kentucky, and the Cumberland. Retired from all the 
world, they reveal the effects of a stable environment 
in a remote region. 



THE APPALACHIAN BARRIER 103 

There is peculiar continuity of conditions through- 
out the long range of the southern Appalachians. 
There run valleys and forested ridges from Virginia 
into Alabama. There an archaic and almost fossil 
type of life has come into being. A temperate 
climate prevails far southward, run in like a wedge 
between the hot lowlands of the Carolinas and the 
Mississippi Valley. The isothermal lines of the 
weather map will sometimes run from New York to 
Alabama on the eastern slope of the Blue Ridge, and 
then double and return direct northward to south- 
ern Michigan, where they turn off again westward. 
Mountain, valley, forest, and climate form a realm 
of upland within lowlands, with strongest industrial, 
social, and political contrasts. There are counties in 
North Carolina that do not contain a single negro. 
But within this land are noble and modern cities, — 
Knoxville, where the Tennessee is formed by con- 
fluent streams, and Chattanooga, where the same river 
leaves the great valley and goes out through the Cum- 
berland plateau. We shall have occasion, in the 
chapter on the Civil War, to return to Chattanooga 
and describe its surroundings with care, but these 
cities shall now stand for the great industrial unfold- 
ing of the last generation in this gateway of the South. 
From Virginia to Alabama plentiful coal and iron lie 
close to each other, sometimes " at pistol range." 
There is limestone also for flux, and thus the condi- 
tions for the making of iron are perfect. There is 
water-power in many mountain streams, and the cotton 
belt is not far away. Just outside the gate is Atlanta, 
predestined by its situation to be a metropolis. The 



104 



GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 



new life of the South is gradually penetrating the 
wilds, bringing education and modern invention 
into the most distant corners of this Southern world, 
and the sternest commands of nature are in the end 
softened, if not defied, by man. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE GREAT LAKES AND AMERICAN COMMERCE 

North America has its mountain systems on the 
east and west. Between them is a vast lowland, 
wider at the north, narrower at the south, but spa- 
cious everywhere. One may follow the Mississippi, 
the Minnesota, and the Red River of the North, pass 
Lake Winnipeg and Hudson Bay, and come out on 
the Arctic Sea. Nowhere in his journey must he be 
more than one thousand feet above the ocean level. 
If the great mountains had been massed in the central 
parts of the continent, their uplands might have been 
as arid and remote and their inhabitants as strange 
and averse to intrusion as among the plateaus of 
central Asia. But North America has the conti- 
nental type of Europe or South America, with moun- 
tain borders and central plains. In South America 
these plains are threaded by rivers ; in Europe sea- 
waters pierce the heart of the lands ; but North 
America has both, and more, — the Hudson Bay, 
the Mississippi and Mackenzie, and the fresh-water 
seas of the St. Lawrence. Suppose there had been 
no Great Lakes ; perhaps, before the glacial time, 
there were none. Suppose there was only a larger 
St. Lawrence, with many branches, flowing from the 
region of Superior and Michigan ; such, very likely, 

i°5 



106 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

there was. Or, suppose the waters of the Lake region 
had found no gap across the eastern mountains and 
had become tributary to the Ohio. If we look at 
a relief map of North America, this seems an easy 
alternative. 

What, in any case, would American history have 
been ? Where would the Frenchman have planted 
himself, and would there have been a French and 
Indian War, and where would the battle-ground be 
found ? These are idle questions if we look for 
answers ; but they may mean much if they fix our 
eyes on the lakes and make us see how large a place 
they have in the life of man on this continent. 

Various European nations were sending vessels 
to the cod banks of Newfoundland about the begin- 
ning of the sixteenth century. There is, according 
to Parkman, some evidence that Europeans began 
to fish in these waters before 1497, tne vear °f Cabot's 
voyage. At all events, the French had learned the 
road, and it was but little more for them to sail be- 
tween Cape North and Cape Ray and find themselves 
within the Gulf of St. Lawrence, with its ample 
waters and its varied shores. It was Jacques Cartier 
who, in 1534, had sailed from St. Malo that he might 
search the unknown regions beyond the fishing-banks. 
He did not, however, take the broader gateway to 
the south of Newfoundland, but went up by the east 
shore and threaded the straits of Belle Isle. 

In the year following he was again fitted out that 
he might ascend the St. Lawrence. He went up 
to the Indian village of Hochelaga, where now is 
Montreal. Though he made a later voyage, he did 



THE GREAT LAKES 107 

not succeed in planting a colony on the river — this 
was left to successors who were more daring, or more 
enduring, than he. But for us his first voyage is full 
of meaning. He entered the continent by its north- 
ern gateway, and he found the two natural centers 
of human population on the great rivers ; for in 
selecting a site on which to plant a town, the instincts 
of the savage were as sure as those of the white man. 

Among the later and greater men was Champlain. 
We have seen him on the New England coast, but 
his name is written in the St. Lawrence country and 
in the waters that divide New York and New Eng- 
land ; and it was left for others to make known the 
country of the Lakes. His first project suggests a 
striking feature of the map of North America. Fol- 
low the estuary and river of the St. Lawrence, Lake 
Ontario, Lake Erie, the Ohio River, and the Missis- 
sippi. Almost in a straight line do these waters join 
the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Gulf of Mexico. 
La Salle was at La Chien, above Montreal. The 
Indians had told him of the Ohio River, and he set 
out to explore it. His story is rehearsed by the his- 
torians, and we may only see how geographic features 
shaped his courses. To go up the St. Lawrence was 
inevitable, and they reached the lake, " like a great 
sea with no land beyond it," writes the pious father 
who accompanied him. 

A few miles east of Rochester, Irondequoit Bay 
penetrates several miles into the lands of western 
New York. It is almost shut off from the lake by 
a sand bar, over which the railway now passes. 
Through this depression it is believed that the pre- 



108 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

glacial Genesee entered the valley where Lake On- 
tario now is. But with the river shifted to the west 
this landlocked bay invited entrance ; and here La 
Salle found the Seneca Indians, from whom he hoped 
to secure a guide to the Ohio. This plan did not 
mature, and he later went to the western end of Lake 
Ontario, near the present city of Hamilton, where he 
met Joliet, who had returned from the upper lakes. 
They did not remain long together, and Joliet and 
his companions were soon threading the waters of 
Detroit, and La Salle, as is believed by some, was 
accomplishing his exploration of the Ohio River. 
Later he went to the greater lakes, voyaged up Huron, 
passed Mackinac, and landed at the south end of 
Lake Michigan. He made the easy pass to the Illi- 
nois, but how far he descended it is not known. His 
planting of a settlement on the Illinois and his voyage 
down the Mississippi to the Gulf belong to a later 
period. It was left for Joliet and Marquette to enter 
Green Bay, pass from the Fox River to the Wiscon- 
sin, discover the Mississippi, and float with its current 
to a point but seven hundred miles from the Gulf. 

Few spots in America have so much historic color 
as Niagara. And the physiographer sees the short 
centuries of human occupation against the back- 
ground of ages of physical evolution. Savage, ex- 
plorer, colonist, soldier, and man of science have 
gathered here, and now the place seems likely to be- 
come the industrial center of the continent ; but man's 
part can hardly be so dramatic and wonderful as the 
story of Niagara in more ancient days. 

When La Salle was, for the time, drawn away from 



110 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

the Ohio River and went along the lake shore with 
Joliet, he crossed the lower Niagara, where, a com- 
monplace stream, it flows over the Ontario plain 
between Lewiston and the lake. He must have 
heard the roar of the falls and perhaps wondered at 
the origin of the solemn and pervasive music, but he 
was not to discover the cataract. It was Hennepin 
who passed up the left bank of the river, looked down 
upon the Whirlpool Rapids, and made with his pen- 
cil the picture whose conventional rows of trees, and 
towering Goat Island rocks, have given the ancient 
priest an immortality which the master of landscape 
would sigh for in vain. 

In 1679 La Salle joined his name to Niagara. 
Here, above the falls, was built the Griffon, a little 
vessel of forty-five tons, and here she was moored 
until her master should return with supplies from 
Fort Frontenac. These necessaries had to be carried 
up the Lewiston Heights, among them the anchor, 
requiring four men, as Parkman relates, " well stimu- 
lated with brandy," to bring it to the plateau above. 
The Griffon went to Green Bay, La Salle went on into 
the wilderness, and the ship setting out to return, 
loaded with furs, was lost. 

Thus Niagara took its place in the human world. 
It was a goal, and it was a point of departure. Follow 
the Lakes, for exploration, for commerce, for war, and 
you must take account of it. Try to learn the story 
of the Lakes, to know their beginnings and their his- 
tory, and a score of geologists must center their 
studies on Niagara, so large is her part in the making 
of things. * 



THE GREAT LAKES HI 

» 
If there were no rapids above Montreal and no 

winter ice in the St. Lawrence, would Buffalo be 
more than a modest town ? Rather would not the 
railways from the west, passing Detroit, cross Onta- 
rio and center upon Hamilton, there to load ships for 
Liverpool, Glasgow, and Hamburg ? Possibly, be- 
cause the mouth of the St. Lawrence is so far north, 
an Erie Canal might have saved something for Buf- 
falo and New York. Or we will suppose the St. 
Lawrence as it is, but no Niagara, and a perfect 
waterway from Erie to Ontario. Would not the in- 
terior metropolis of New York then be Oswego? 
Here would be the eastern limit of navigation and 
the point of reshipment for the Mohawk Valley. 
Niagara makes the difference, and hence it is that 
Lake Erie is swept by the great vessels of the upper 
lakes, and Ontario is in comparison a lonely water. 
It is hers to bear a modest freight, a few lines of 
tourist steamers, and spend the rest of her energies 
carving cliffs in the massive glacial drift that often 
borders her shores. The story of her future com- 
merce, however, is not written. 

Reference has been made to the Ontario Lake 
plain, crossed by the lower Niagara ; to the cliffs at 
Lewiston ; to the gorge, and to the Niagara plateau. 
For the reader who has not visited the region, it will 
be useful to explain more fully the geographical sur- 
roundings of the Falls. In an earlier chapter, the 
lake plains of western New York were distinguished 
from the Alleghany plateau. But there are really 
two lake plains. Lake Erie lies in the upper one, 
which slopes abruptly up into the Alleghany pla- 



112 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

teau, beyond Dunkirk and Chautauqua, but stretches 
smoothly eastward from Buffalo for many miles. 
Lake Ontario lies in the lower plain, and the differ- 
ence of altitude between the two lake surfaces is 
nearly three hundred feet. About half of this verti- 
cal interval is accounted for by the bluffs at Lewiston. 
These face north and are known as the Niagara es- 
carpment. This wall runs west, far through Ontario, 
and east toward Rochester. The famous series of 
locks at Lockport carries the Erie Canal from the 
upper to the lower plain. The upper surface, viewed 
in reference to Lake Erie, is a lake plain, and was 
formerly flooded with lake waters. Viewed in refer- 
ence to Ontario, it is the Niagara plateau. Its smooth 
top is formed upon the flat Niagara limestone, and 
the escarpment is chiefly the north or exposed edge 
of this formation. When Niagara began to flow, it 
fell over the bluff at Lewiston. Cutting away the 
limestone under the brink, the fall has receded until 
it is now seven miles south, and the Niagara Gorge 
is seven miles long — a history which seems simple, 
and is, in this, its great feature, but in many other 
ways is an intricate story and difficult to decipher. 

On Lake Erie we are 573 feet above the sea. If 
we go up through the Detroit and St. Clair rivers, 
upon Lake Huron or Michigan, we are but 8 feet 
higher. And if we ascend through the locks of the 
" Soo " to Lake Superior, we add but 21 feet more, 
and our altitude is 602 feet. A little help from man, 
therefore, turns the four upper lakes into a single sea, 
with free navigation between remotest points. Thus, 
too, we can see how the cutting of the Chicago Drain- 



114 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

age Canal might become a matter of concern, not 
merely to St. Louis, for fear of sewage, but to Cleve- 
land or Buffalo, if a considerable portion of Niagara 
should be diverted to the Mississippi. If this be 
speculation, it serves at least to point out the delicate 
balance of the lake waters. They are a great sea, 
and the southwest pass is so low that "tidal waves 
arising in Lake Michigan sometimes overflowed the 
dividing ridge. The early explorers of the Great 
Lakes are known to have passed, during the spring 
freshets, in their canoes from one valley to the other, 
by that route which enables the modern Chicago to 
discharge its sewage into the Gulf of IVfexico instead 
of the Gulf of St. Lawrence." 1 

The chief drainage of the Great Lake regie^ was 
once carried to the sea by the Chicago outlet. And 
still later the waters of the upper lakes went thro Ugh 
the Mohawk Valley to the Hudson, and later stMl they 
went by the Ottawa Valley to the St. Lawrence. Now 
they go by Port Huron and Niagara. Let us not 
think that this present arrangement must last for- 
ever. We know that in late geological times, even 
since the close of the glacial period, most of the plain 
that holds the Lakes has been given an increasing slant 
toward the southwest. Mr. G. K. Gilbert, following 
up this suggestion, has shown with an approach to 
certainty that this tilting is yet going on, with the re- 
sult that in a few centuries the Lakes would withdraw 
some of their waters from the Niagara to the Missis- 
sippi, and in a few thousand years would leave Niagara 
dry. The tilting may not, however, go on, and if it 

1 Winsor, " Cartier to Frontenac," p. 4. 



THE GREAT LAKES 115 

does, man can restrain the change of outflow for a 
long period if he desires. 

Vast as the Lakes are, they have seen many revolu- 
tions and are still young. They rest in shallow 
depressions on a widespreading plain, which, so to 
speak, is so delicately poised that movements within 
the earth can change the face of things, and might 
have made quite other than it is, the theater of Amer- 
ican history. 

It is time for us to tell in a more connected way the 
story of the Lakes, and to put in their true setting the 
scattered facts already given. Many questions about 
their origin cannot now be answered, but the closing 
events are better known than the early stages of the 
history. It will be useful, in a preliminary way, to 
banish false notions about the depth of the lake 
basins. One thousand feet seems a great depth of 
water, but Lake Superior is four hundred miles long. 
The ratio of depth to length is about one to two thou- 
sand. With this ratio a lake one mile long would be 
two and one-half feet deep. If we could drain the 
basin of Lake Superior, it would present a vast plain, 
with hardly a variation from the horizontal that the 
eye could detect. The case would be similar with 
Michigan, Huron, and Ontario, while Erie is yet more 
surprising. Her depth is to length nearly as one to 
seven thousand, and a lake one mile long would be 
nine or ten inches deep ! 

We cannot have a fair opinion about the forces that 
made the basins unless we remember that these 
basins are mere scratches on the continent, or faint 
sags, like those that harbor shallow water in a flat 



Il6 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

meadow after rain. We should also put the depth of 
the Lakes in relation to sea-level. All but Lake Erie 
reach below this horizon, — Superior about four hun- 
dred feet, Ontario nearly five hundred feet, Michigan 
nearly three hundred feet, and Huron about 150 feet. 
Erie, being so shallow, keeps its bottom 363 feet above 
the sea. 

Look upon the map of the Laurentian waters and 
imagine the Lakes shrinking in width until they be- 
come mere sections of a great St. Lawrence River, 
rising in Minnesota and on the highlands north of 
Lake Superior. Let it flow somewhere near the 
" Soo" and take in a branch from along the axis of 
Lake Michigan. Let it pass the Huron, to the On- 
tario country, receiving branches from southern 
Ontario and northern Ohio, and then go down to the 
sea. If there was such a greater St. Lawrence, this 
may not be a true picture of it, but it would probably 
do for the essentials. 

If we could now imagine great sections of these 
river valleys to be deepened, or to be in any manner 
shut off from the sea, the surplus rain-waters would 
gather in them, and we should see the inland seas of 
to-day. 

We have taken this way of approaching what is 
perhaps the leading theory about the Lakes, that they 
lie in blocked river valleys. Then the query comes, 
— what sort of barriers are these, or what could they 
be ? The Lake country is now tipping to the south- 
west ; it is not a very disturbing motion, — about 
five inches in a distance of one hundred miles in a 
century. But that would be four feet in a thousand 



THE GREAT LAKES 117 

years, and a thousand years in the earth's history is 
not much. We can see that such tilting would hinder 
the flow of Ontario's waters past the Thousand 
Islands and would make the lake deeper. The 
basins may, therefore, be partly due to uprising of the 
lands toward the outlets of the rivers. 

But the Lakes are doubtless not due to this single 
cause. Every foot of the Lake country was occupied 
by glacial ice. Massive beds of drift, in sheets or 
morainic heaps, were left when the ice melted away. 
The moraines show themselves in hills, and the sheets 
are often revealed by deep borings, or by their cover- 
ing the country so smoothly and so deeply that in 
certain regions, bed-rock rarely comes to the surface. 
Ancient valleys were often shut up by bodies of 
drift, and multitudes of the smaller lakes lie in such 
pockets in old valleys. There is no reason why great 
valleys should not in some places have been barred 
in the same way. Moving glaciers also remove rocks 
from beneath them. Their weight is great, and they 
are shod with sand and boulders. But they do not 
erode equally everywhere. Where the ice is thickest 
or is hardest pushed, both from its own weight and 
the onthrust from behind, there it will dig most. 
Thus some observers believe that the Great Lake 
basins are more due to glacial erosion than to any- 
thing else. There is no reason why all the causes 
which have been described may not have lent their 
aid. 

There is another word to be added to this bundle 
of queries. The relations of the rocks here are such 
that valley-making seems inevitable in the long 



Il8 .GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

preglacial time. The softer, horizontal strata of 
the Northern United States abut against the hard, 
ancient core of North America, found in Canada. 
Where these flat beds run over the southerly slopes 
of the crystalline uplands of the north, they would 
suffer most destruction, and by laws known to physi- 
ography, valleys would grow, of which the primitive 
land forms give no hint. Some sort of a St. Law- 
rence River system was to be expected from earliest 
times. Movements of the land, glacial blockades, and 
glacial erosion have done the rest. 

The later development of the Lakes can be more 
clearly told. When the historian has pieced together 
from stray inscriptions and traditions a doubtful 
story of early man, he may come down to a point 
where records abound, and libraries give him more 
material than he can use. Then, if he have diligence 
and judgment, he can move with firm step. Some- 
thing like this certainty we have, — when the continen- 
tal glacier was disappearing, when the lakes were 
often larger, — and always of forms different from 
those of to-day. Great bodies of water leave on their 
borders inscriptions which centuries may not destroy 
or deface. By records of ancient shore-lines, we 
prove that the Lakes were often larger and had 
higher levels than they now have. 

If the reader would know this history, let him 
clearly trace the line of water partings that separate 
the St. Lawrence basin from those of the Mississippi 
and Susquehanna. In Minnesota the head waters of 
the Mississippi reach close to Lake Superior. Wis- 
consin is more evenly divided, where the Fox and 



120 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

Wisconsin rivers head against each other in the cen- 
tral part of the state. In Illinois the parting is hard 
by Chicago and is overcome by a few feet of dig- 
ging. It crosses northern Indiana and northern Ohio, 
and runs close to Lake Erie, as it enters western 
New York. In New York the divide is south of the 
Finger Lakes, and we need pursue it no further ex- 
cept to mark on the map the place of Elmira. 

When the ice was at its limits it lay far southward 
over the line of water partings. The ice-sheet was 
removed by gradual melting on the south. Some- 
times it disappeared from great regions and advanced 
again. When at any point the ice melted north of 
the divide, a lake would result. Its basin would be 
formed by the height of land on the south and the 
glacial ice on the north. Its form would depend on 
the turns of the line of water parting and the irregu- 
larities of the ice front; the water would be supplied 
by the melting ice; the outlets would be across the 
divides into head waters of the Mississippi and Sus- 
quehanna. 

Now we can understand what was happening at 
the head of the present Lake Michigan. After the 
ice began to melt northward, out of the Lake Michi- 
gan basin, the site of Chicago was flooded. The 
overflow went along the line of the Drainage Canal 
into the Illinois River. The longer the ice melted, 
the greater became the lake, and the more water 
poured out toward the Mississippi. Exactly similar 
things were taking place at about the same time, at 
the head of the Superior basin. Along the slopes 
about Duluth the old beaches tell the story. The ice 



THE GREAT LAKES 121 

filled more or less of the lake basin, holding up the 
waters so that they poured over into the St. Croix, 
and thus went to the Gulf. If we go to Indiana and 
Ohio, the conditions are the same, only now we are 
at the head of the Lake Erie lobe of the glacier. 
As before it is melting away, and lake waters rise 
against the divide and flow over, at Fort Wayne, 
where the ancient channel, now dry, has been traced 
and has been shown to be in harmony with old 
beaches in Indiana and Ohio. 

At Elmira in New York, or a little to the north, is 
the lowest southward pass in the state, east of the 
Hudson, not quite a thousand feet above the sea. 
Think of the glacier, still massive, where Lake Ontario 
now is, and reaching well up into western New York. 
All the basins of the Finger Lakes then held lakes 
deeper and greater than now. Southward, these lakes 
were restrained by the divides. Northward, as before, 
they laved the ice front. And for a time their 
northern ends coalesced, and they had a common out- 
let through Seneca Valley, past Elmira, and down 
the Chemung to the Susquehanna. 

We must remind the reader that these lakes at the 
head of Superior, Michigan, and Erie, and in western 
New York, may not have been contemporaneous, but 
they represent a stage in the retreat of the ice, and 
were not far apart, as the geologist reckons time. As 
the ice melted yet more, the lowlands of the Lake 
region were flooded, larger lakes were formed, and 
some of the old outlets were abandoned because the 
passes were too high. One of these vast lakes ex- 
tended from the Finger Lake region westward, over 



122 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

much of northern Ohio, southern Ontario, and south- 
ern Michigan. Its outlet crossed the unsubmerged 
part of southern Michigan and entered the Michigan 
basin, whence the waters passed out by the Chicago 
outlet. This ancient body of water was held to its 
place by the great glacier that still blocked the Mo- 
hawk and St. Lawrence valleys and the eastern 
Ontario region. The beaches which mark its pres- 
ence and prove its reality are about 870 feet above 
the sea, and it is known as Lake Warren. 

By various stages these waters were drawn down, the 
channel across Michigan was abandoned, and we find 
the outflow taking place by the Mohawk Valley. The 
outline of the Great Lakes has been revolutionized. 
Western New York is in great part dry land, but 
Lake Ontario washes the base of the Niagara escarp- 
ment, flows up the Cayuga Valley, absorbs Oneida 
Lake, and sends its waters to the Hudson. This 
drainage makes a great river, for it comes not only 
from the greater Ontario but from a vast upper 
lake, which, absorbing Superior, Michigan, and Hu- 
ron, discharges across the Province of Ontario into 
Iroquois, for this is the name which we should give to 
the ancestral Ontario. Another great result of the 
descent of the Warren waters to the Iroquois level 
was the uncovering of the Niagara escarpment, and 
the beginning of Niagara River and Niagara cat- 
aract. But it will be observed that it was a small 
Niagara, for the upper waters were going more 
directly to the sea, by way of the Georgian Bay 
region and Lake Iroquois. 

Later still we find no ice in the St. Lawrence Val- 



THE GREAT LAKES 1 23 

ley. Here, then, was a lower outlet for Lake Iroquois, 
and the Mohawk Valley was abandoned, save by the 
little stream gathered from the New York uplands. 
At the same time, the upper lake waters had shifted 
to a more northern outlet and were reaching the St. 
Lawrence by way of the Ottawa Valley. The whole 
St. Lawrence region was now so low that the sea flowed 
freely in, and the tides were felt far up the Ottawa 
Valley and to the head of Lake Ontario and in the 
valley of Lake Champlain. Niagara was still a little 
river and could boast only of the waters of Lake Erie, 
and Lake Erie was smaller than it is to-day. And 
now comes the closing scene in this long drama. The 
eastern country began to rise and the sea to retire from 
Lake Ontario and the upper St. Lawrence. By and 
by the uplift had become too great to permit the 
upper lake waters to flow east by the Ottawa Valley. 
They swing back to Port Huron and Niagara, and 
Niagara became the great river which it is to-day. 

This is the upward movement of the land which, as 
Mr. Gilbert has shown, is probably still going on. In 
our short story of the Lakes we have been able to see 
how the ice filled their basins and perhaps deepened 
them, how small lakes were replaced by greater ones, 
and how successive outflows of their waters have been 
directed to the southward, westward, eastward, and 
northeastward. The lands have changed their levels, 
and Niagara has been born and grown to be what 
she is. 

At Lewiston, N.Y., on the plain below the Ni- 
agara escarpment, is a low ridge of gravel running 
eastward. It is prolonged through several coun- 



124 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

ties in western New York, and has been used for 
a line of highway since the days of the earliest 
settlers. This avenue, leading through rich farm- 
ing and fruit lands, has always been known as the 
Ridge Road. It represents in part only the beach 
of the ancient Lake Iroquois, which has been fol- 
lowed eastward to central New York, and then 
northward to Watertown. At Lewiston the beach 
is about 140 feet above Lake Ontario, but at the 
east end of the lake it is from two hundred to three 
hundred feet higher than the lake surface. As the 
old beach must have been horizontal when made, 
we find here the proof that the region has been given 
an inclination to the west and southwest. The story 
of these beaches would be a long one, but when it is 
read it gives a convincing sense of reality concerning 
the glacial lakes which we have described. Finding the 
beaches in Ohio, and girding the slopes of Mackinac 
Island, or high above the waters of Lake Superior, 
and surmounted now by the great buildings and busy 
streets of Duluth, we cannot doubt their meaning. 
The most skeptical should yield credence, when, cor- 
relating with the shore-lines, he finds the outlet chan- 
nels at Chicago, at Fort Wayne, at Elmira, at Rome, 
or in the Mattawa Valley leading from Georgian 
Bay to the Ottawa River. 

Where the lands that stretch away from the lake 
shores are almost flat, the ancient Lakes must have 
reached far inland. This is true in western New 
York, northern Ohio, and southern Ontario. And 
there we find the soils and subsoils consisting of clays 
and fine silts, that is, of just such material as settles 



126 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

in the bottom of lakes at some distance from the 
shore. The plowman is not annoyed by boulders, 
and the farmer finds smooth and level areas, easy 
of tillage and rich in production. Transportation is 
simple and inexpensive, railways are easily built, and 
the land is foreordained to prosperity. Thus have 
the Lakes themselves fashioned thousands of square 
miles of the lands that lie about them, spreading their 
soils upon their rocky foundations, and now bearing 
away their harvests to remote cities. Nor are the 
Lakes without large influence upon the climate of the 
region. There are nearly one hundred thousand 
miles of water surface, and the contribution to atmos- 
pheric moisture through evaporation is enormous. 
More than this, the Lakes are deep, and contain six 
thousand cubic miles of water. The heat that is 
received into these waters during the warmer parts 
of the year is stored and gradually set free during 
the autumn and winter, tempering the atmosphere of 
surrounding lands. Hence the fields of the Iroquois 
plain are garnished with forests of peach trees, and 
vineyards cover the Erie shore plains of the Chautau- 
qua region. Soil and climate alike are the gift of the 
Lakes. Those who live in the more southern land 
rarely think of genial climate in Canada, but the Lake 
region of the province of Ontario abounds in orchards 
and raises the vine in profusion. 

We have approached the Lakes down the long lines 
of their physical history only that we may better 
know what they have meant in the life of man dur- 
ing the short centuries since America was found 
by European people. When the devout missionary 



THE GREAT LAKES 



27 



and hardy explorer had ascended the St. Lawrence, 
the open waters would carry him to the heart of 
the continent. Or if he pushed up the Ottawa 
and threaded the rough forests that lay toward the 
Georgian Bay, he could bid farewell to the bouldery 
jungle, and paddle his canoe to the Chicago River, 
Green Bay, or the head of Lake Superior, and thence 
by easy portages he could find his way into some 
head water of the great Mississippi. And when the 
missionary and the trapper were followed by the per- 
manent settler, forts were planted, cabins rose on the 
prairie and in the forest, towns grew up on bays and 
in the mouths of rivers, the towns became cities, and 
the cities sent fleets of vessels up and down these 
inland seas, bearing the grain of an empire, and at 
length stores of mineral wealth whose very existence 
was hidden until our own time. 

No other inland navigation in the world compares 
with that of the Laurentian Lakes, and what it may 
become in the century just begun it would be rash 
to foretell. Every lake washes the borders of rich 
lands, and these lands reach across the prairies and 
down the Mississippi, over the plains to the far North- 
west, and eastward by two great gateways to the 
Atlantic. Most of the great railways now converge 
on the Lakes, and it is only sober prophecy to forecast 
ships of large tonnage sailing from the Lakes to the 
Hudson and lower St. Lawrence by two or more 
routes from the Lakes to the Mississippi, and from 
Superior, by way of Winnipeg, to Hudson Bay. For 
some of these the surveys are complete, and in at 
least two instances construction is much more than 



128 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

begun. Far more wonderful would the present have 
seemed to those who 225 years ago launched the first 
sailing vessel on the upper Lakes. 

The governments, both of the United States and 
of Canada, have not been slow to see the meaning 
of the Lakes. As early as 1841 the United States 
Lake Survey was planned, and its work carried on 
for forty years. The character of the shores, the 
nature of the bottoms, and the depths of the water 
were determined and recorded in maps which are 
now available to sailors and to all. The work is sim- 
ilar to that of the United States Coast Survey. As 
with the ocean, so on lake borders, conditions change, 
bars are built, bays are silted up, new shoals are 
found, and revision of the older work has been found 
necessary and has been undertaken. 

From the head of Lake Michigan, or of Lake Su- 
perior, to the lower part of Lake Erie, the shipman 
finds nearly one thousand miles of continuous sailing. 
By the locks on St. Marys River, and by dredging 
parts of the channel between Huron and Erie, vessels 
drawing twenty feet of water can now make this voy- 
age. From Buffalo and Cleveland on the east this 
great highway, forking in upper Lake Huron, finds 
its western gate in Chicago, Milwaukee, and Duluth. 

Down to the present time the lake trade converges 
eastward upon Buffalo. Here the products of the 
West are transferred to railway and canal, excepting 
those which, in boats of moderate draught, go on 
their way down the Welland Canal to Lake Ontario 
and Montreal. Soon after La Salle had launched 
the Griffon near by, another Frenchman, Baron La 



130 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

Honton, saw that the plain at the foot of the lake had 
meaning for the future, and a fort was built. Nearly 
a century later the British held the place and called 
it Fort Erie, and the commerce of the Great Lakes 
began. The place was not known as Buffalo until 
1 8 io, when its first steamboat, Walk-in-the-Water, 
went westward. Its greater development began in 
1825, when the Erie Canal was finished. 

One hundred and fifty miles up the south shore of 
Lake Erie is the rival port of the lower Lakes. There 
seems to be, at first view, no compelling reason why 
a large city should grow where Cleveland is. It is 
not at the head or foot of a great lake; it is not 
so near to extensive mineral deposits as to arouse 
expectation ; it has, indeed, a rich farming land to the 
south ; it is on the lake shore, and a small river, the 
Cuyahoga, draining a few counties of northern Ohio, 
enters the lake here. There was a trading post at 
Pittsburg and another at Detroit. The mouth of the 
Cuyahoga was nearly on a line between the two, was 
a convenient halting place, and a trading post was 
established. In 1796, the Connecticut Land Com- 
pany sent Moses Cleaveland to survey the ground, and 
his name, lacking a letter, became attached to it. A 
real settlement began in 1797, and real prosperity 
began, when, in 1834, a waterway, the Ohio Canal, 
joined the place with the Ohio River. No other 
geographic cause is so compelling in the making of 
cities as a line of transportation, or, perhaps we ought 
to say, the convergence of such lines. 

Cleveland was, for long, the second city of Ohio, 
springing to the first place only at the close of the 



THE GREAT LAKES 131 

last century, and offering one example among others 
of the advantages of lake and seaports as compared 
with river towns. Fifty years ago a trivial consign- 
ment of iron ore was here received from Lake Supe- 
rior. Nobody heard of it, or if it was known, it stirred 
no thought. But Cleveland was not, after all, so re- 
moved from the treasures of the under earth. Coal 
was mining in the Mahoning Valley, on the east bor- 
der of the state. It was coming to Cleveland ; and 
later, also, more ore was brought and coal was made 
to smelt the iron. At length, also, the trail between 
trading posts had become a railway, and Pittsburg 
and Cleveland had been made neighbors. There was 
unlimited coal about Pittsburg, and the ore, coming in 
vast shiploads through the deepened canal of St. 
Marys River, was swiftly transferred at Cleveland 
and sent to the city of furnaces. Meantime oil and 
gas developed, pipe-lines were run down from the oil 
fields, and Cleveland became the greatest of petroleum 
centers. East and west along the lake shore run the 
transcontinental railways ; and so it turns out that the 
little valley of the Cuyahoga River is at the crossing 
of two of the greatest highways in America. 

Detroit, named from the narrow water passage 
between Huron and Erie, is, in its name, a lasting 
memorial of French discovery and early occupation. 
There were earlier posts on the Lakes above, but 
Cadillac had the sagacity to see that the fur trade 
could best be centered and controlled where Detroit 
now is. He returned to France, convinced the 
ministry of his wisdom, and gained a grant of land, 
" wherever on the Detroit (strait) the new fort should 



132 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

be established." The settlement came into English 
possession in 1762, was held by the British for a time 
in the War of 18 12, and had become by 18 18 a popu- 
lous and lively community. Eight years before, Walk- 
in-tlie- Water had sailed from Buffalo, and now lake 
commerce was becoming large, and a more settled 
and refined life was mingling with the rougher ele- 
ments of the frontier. 

For through commerce on the Lakes Detroit would 
be but a calling-place, and we must not overlook the 
essential part which the railway has had in her 
growth. The great east and west highways must 
go either north or south of Lake Erie. Those that 
run north of the lake cross the river at Detroit and, 
entering Canada, divide in like manner upon Lake 
Ontario. Here, then, as in Cleveland, we have a 
crossing of the ways, and here also must converge 
the more local lines of railway which serve the South- 
ern peninsula and carry its traffic to the South and 
East. 

The greatest of lake ports is not at the head of 
Lake Michigan, but nearly twenty miles north, on 
the western shore. Chicago is determined by the 
same cause that guided Joliet and Marquette, La 
Salle and Hennepin, when they sojourned in this 
region, or sought the sources of the Mississippi. 
Here an insignificant river enters the lake, and its 
short courses lead to the pass whose history lies in 
the geological past, and whose importance to man is 
now beginning to be seen. And yet upon this stream, 
by dredging and by building docks, forty-one miles 
of frontage have been made available, and the har- 



THE GREAT LAKES 



133 



borage outside has been extended by breakwater 
construction, until fleets can anchor here, where two 
generations ago a small town lay along a straight 
shore-line and on two sides of a shallow, muddy, and 
unknown river. It is now ninety-nine years since the 
first permanent white settlers occupied Chicago, and 




Fig. 26. Shipping in the Chicago River. Photograph by Wm. II. 
Rau, Philadelphia. 



the civilian population was barely a hundred in 1830. 
In the last decade of the nineteenth century Chicago 
increased her population by fifty-four per cent and has 
in the beginning of the twentieth century nearly two 
millions of people. This was due in no measure to 
local conditions, for her harbor had to be created 
and the very ground raised from a swamp. The 
greatness of Chicago is due to its general geographic 



134 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

relations and to the combination, as with Cleveland 
and Detroit, of railway and water transportation. 

From the prairies, the plains, and the passes of the 
northern Rocky Mountains, the railway lines must 
round the head of Lake Michigan. All passers 
between East and West must pay tribute here. 
Traffic from the Southwest is drawn to the Lakes, 
and all lines from the farther Northwest must come 
down to Chicago. Whatever diversions may occur at 
Duluth or along Canadian lines of railway, they can- 
not injure the lake metropolis, though they may in 
some ways check its rate of expansion. 

Milwaukee compares in an interesting way with its 
greater neighbor. Its natural advantages of immedi- 
ate environment are far greater : a good harbor, fine 
rising ground for her streets and buildings, and a 
river for water-power. She is also favored by being 
the center of interest and the capital of a great com- 
monwealth ; but not all of these gains can counter- 
balance the relations which Chicago holds to the 
entire country. Like Chicago, Milwaukee bears an 
Indian name, but like the greater city also the 
French explorers led the way, and the first white set- 
tler upon Milwaukee Bay, in 1817, bore the name of 
Juneau. But no one thinks of France to-day when 
he enters, on the shore of Lake Michigan, one of the 
greatest of German-American cities. 

The cold and abundant waters that flow out of 
Lake Superior encounter a tough sill of ancient rocks, 
over which, in foaming rapids, they leap down to 
enter the expanse of Lake Huron. Lake Superior 
could have little more than local commerce until this 



136 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

obstacle was overcome. As she is surrounded, not 
by prairies yielding grain and fruit, but by rough and 
rocky lands, bearing forests on their slopes and min- 
eral wealth beneath their scanty soils and bare ledges, 
exchange becomes imperative, for no region of two or 
three resources, however rich, can live to itself. The 
governor of Michigan saw the need as long ago as 
1837 an d stirred the legislature to its task. Baffled 
for many years by conservative influences in the 
national government, necessity won at last, and a 
canal was finished in 1853. It was twelve feet deep, 
and its completion made possible a continuous passage 
from the head of Lake Superior to Buffalo. In a few 
years enlargement was needed, and the national gov- 
ernment took up the work. The deepening of the locks 
and of the approaching channels to seventeen feet 
was not enough, and the depth has now been carried to 
twenty-one feet. Similar works have been completed 
by the Canadian government within a dozen years, 
and the tonnage that passes this gateway is stated 
in figures that baffle comprehension. That of the 
Suez Canal is light in comparison with it ; and where 
small cargoes fifty years ago were laboriously carried 
around the rapids, a vessel of eight thousand tons, 
having on board the product of eleven thousand acres 
of wheat, or a cargo of iron ore, passes in a few 
moments. But little of the water of Superior is 
needed for the locks, and power canals have been 
built on the American and on the Canadian side of 
the river. The iron, nickel, and other minerals of the 
region have been developed, and a railway projected 
to Hudson Bay to open within a few years the lum- 



THE GREAT LAKES 1 37 

ber, grain, minerals, and fish of that northern region. 
Varied manufactures and a route of traffic must here 
build up one more of the great centers of the Lake 
region. 

Not least of these will be the head of Lake Supe- 
rior. Historic time in this domain is so short that 
prophecy swiftly leads one on from the brief records 
of the past. On the steep slopes rising from the 
chilling waters of the lake is Duluth, another memo- 
rial of early French occupation. We might better 
say visitation, for Captain Jean DuLuth, in 1760, only 
built a hut, and it was more than a century later 
when a city was chartered here. Though not yet one 
of the greatest cities, it is already one of the greatest 
ports of the Lakes, and no limit can be placed to its 
possible unfolding. Here is the focal point for the 
grain of Minnesota, the Dakotas, and the vast north- 
west provinces of Canada. When deeper waterways 
shall have been dug eastward from the Lakes, there 
will be no breaking of bulk between Duluth and New 
York, Liverpool, or Hamburg. The head of Lake 
Superior is five hundred miles nearer to the grain- 
growing empire of the Northwest than is Chicago, and 
the result is inevitable. Here, too, within a few score 
miles are the largest iron-ore beds known in America. 
And most of the ore lies, not in deeply buried veins, 
but close to the surface, making it possible to mine it 
with steam shovels in open pits, into which railway 
tracks are carried, and from which the loaded cars 
are run down to the docks at Duluth and in its neigh- 
borhood, there to transfer their loads to the lake 
vessels. It reaches its destination in Cleveland or 



138 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

Pittsburg at a trivial cost which has made possible 
the enormous development of iron and steel in recent 
years. Added to the iron ranges of Minnesota are 
the great stores of iron and native copper in the 
northern peninsula of Michigan, and the lumber of 
Michigan, northern Wisconsin, and the adjacent parts 
of Canada. We shall not forget that other ports 
on the Lakes — Ashland, Marquette, Port Huron, 
Toledo, and many others — are great in commerce, 
being overshadowed somewhat by their larger rivals. 
It has often been said that the great cities are 
made by railroads. This is the more plausible be- 
cause shallow waterways, like the Erie Canal, have 
lost their importance. But the railway can never 
displace the deep waterway in carrying other than 
perishable freight. We may, therefore, look forward 
to enormous extension of traffic of the Great Lakes 
through the ship canals of the future. One of these 
will open the way from Lake Erie to New York 
Harbor. By an act of 1897 the United States govern- 
ment undertook an investigation of routes for water- 
ways between the Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean, and 
an elaborate report of the engineers was transmitted 
to Congress in 1900. Should this report lead to 
action, it is proposed to pass from the Niagara River 
above the Falls to Lake Ontario, either by a route 
close to the river, and entering it again at Lewiston, 
or by a line a few miles to the eastward. From Lake 
Ontario to the Hudson alternative routes are pro- 
posed, one by Oswego and the Mohawk Valley, the 
other by the St. Lawrence, Lake Champlain, and 
eastern New York. To accomplish such a plan will 



140 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

go far to perpetuate and increase the commercial 
superiority of New York City. 

Within a few years the Canadian government has 
completed its great project of cutting a fourteen-foot 
waterway from Lake Erie to tide-water, by way of 
the Welland Canal, and by passing around the vari- 
ous impracticable sections of the St. Lawrence River. 
These channels have a total length of nearly seventy- 
five miles. Other schemes have been proposed which 
in the end may mean much to this growing northern 
empire. A canal from Georgian Bay to the navigable 
waters of the Ottawa River would give direct passage 
from Chicago and Duluth to Montreal and Liverpool. 
If a map be consulted, it will be found that a line 
from Georgian Bay to Montreal is one side of a tri- 
angle, whose remaining sides must be traversed by 
vessels taking the Port Huron route. This proposed 
waterway has almost romantic interest because 
through it passed the waters of the upper Lakes 
at the close of the glacial period. As railways look 
back to ancestral trails of savages or wild beasts, so 
this plan of navigation recalls a yet more distant era. 

The Chicago Drainage Canal was not cut across 
the prairie for a single end. Already it disposes of 
the sewage and secures greater purity of the lake 
water-supply, but its twenty-eight miles of channel, 
cut broad and deep through the drift and solid rock, 
are to be the first link in a waterway that shall pass 
through the Illinois River to the Mississippi and join 
the Great Lakes to the Gulf. This means unhindered 
communication between the Gulf of St. Lawrence and 
the Gulf of Mexico. It means more than this; for 



THE GREAT LAKES 141 

when the Isthmian Canal has been built, direct 
freight service can be had, for exchange of all the 
products of the Northwest, with the Western coast 
of America and the entire Orient. Then the dreams 
of explorers will be more than fulfilled. They sought 
the East by way of the Great Lakes, and their de- 
scendants of the twentieth century will have found 
the way. No distant future may see Minneapolis 
sending its flour in shiploads to Duluth and the East ; 
for a route has already been surveyed. From Su- 
perior to Lake Winnipeg; from the Mississippi and 
Minnesota rivers to the Red River of the North ; and 
from Lake Winnipeg to Hudson Bay, — these are 
among the possible triumphs of the future. Pitts- 
burg and Lake Erie will be joined, Niagara will 
merge with Buffalo as the industrial center of North 
America, the agricultural riches of the Northwest 
and of the arid lands will have been developed, and 
the adjustment of human life to its North American 
environment will enter upon an advanced stage. It 
has been no part of the present plan to give the sta- 
tistics of Great Lake commerce, but rather to show 
some of the laws and centers of its growth. If, 
however, we remember that the tonnage (not the 
value) of Cleveland lake traffic has sometimes sur- 
passed that of Liverpool, and that the Detroit River, 
in the seven open months, exceeds the import and 
export tonnage of our Atlantic and Pacific ports com- 
bined, we shall find that the largest expectations of 
the coming half-century are sober and reasonable. 



CHAPTER V 

THE PRAIRIE COUNTRY 

We are beginning to see that geographic prov- 
inces cannot be sharply defined. The Appalachian 
barrier grades down to the coastal plain through 
the Piedmont Hills, and on the west the Alleghany 
plateau slopes to the level of the prairies. So when 
we say prairie country, we mean the great northern 
central land, whose most characteristic phase is 
prairie : and yet Ohio and Indiana are but in a small 
way prairie states. Illinois and Iowa are the typical 
regions, and we include roughly the lands lying around 
them : southern Minnesota and Wisconsin, northern 
Missouri, and the states west of the Missouri River, 
so far as they are well enough watered to grow crops 
freely without irrigation. From the uplands of Wis- 
consin to the mouth of the Ohio, and from the state 
of Ohio well into Nebraska, lies the land to which we 
turn. It is the upper Mississippi Valley, shorn, how- 
ever, of two great regions : one about the head waters 
of the Ohio, and the other stretching far along the 
upper Missouri. The former belongs to the Alle- 
ghany plateau, and the latter to the Great Plains and 
the Rocky Mountains. But we cannot draw a line 
between the prairie and those flat lands that surround 
the Lakes and once formed part of their bottoms. 

142 



THE PRAIRIE COUNTRY 



143 



Into this great open land civilized man might 
come by several doorways, and two of them were 
equally open and inviting. One would have led the 
explorer up from the Gulf of Mexico. The Spaniard 
looked in at this door, — indeed, he entered it, and 
camped just within ; but he found no gold, and thus 
he carried his trails and left the tokens of his language 
among the mountains and plateaus of the distant 
Southwest. How blind he was to the seat of empire, 
we need no special wisdom now to see. He would 
cede it to his northern neighbor, and it would by and 
by be sold for a few paltry millions of dollars. 

The Frenchman came in at the other open door, 
along the Laurentian waters. Armed with triple mo- 
tive, — love of adventure, the gospel of his faith, and 
zeal for the gains of peltry, — he made the Mississippi 
Valley for the time his own. If these motives were 
mingled in some, they burned singly and with pure 
flame in others. If there were hypocrites among 
true and suffering heralds of the faith, there were 
men also mingled with the scoundrels that bartered 
pelts with the savages and threw off the bonds of 
decent society in the wilds of the forest. With the 
mixed motives of common human nature, but always 
with daring, the prairie country was crossed from 
north to south and from east to west. 

It marked an epoch in the history of the New 
World when Joliet and Marquette pushed their little 
craft up the Fox River, toward those head waters from 
which, by a short portage, they should go over to the 
Wisconsin. When their canoe was launched again, 
the Mississippi Valley was won ; for they needed 



144 



GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 



but to give themselves to the current, to pass the 
Missouri, the Ohio, and the Arkansas, and to have 
sailed out into the Gulf, had not the risks seemed too 
great, among swarms of hostile natives. Having run 
by the mouth of the Arkansas, they turned against 
the current, but entered, as they returned, the Illinois 
River, found it easy to overcome its sluggish flow, 
and came back to Green Bay by the portage at the 
head of Lake Michigan. 




Bridge across the Mississippi at St. Louis. 



It remained for La Salle to assert with larger confi- 
dence, and by the warrant of more remote journey- 
ings, the rights of his king in the Mississippi country, 
a drainage basin which perhaps seems more vast to us 
who know, than to the explorer who was living in the 
shadowy realm of the imagination. When La Salle 
had returned to Paris, he was fully awake to the need 
of possessing and fortifying the new realm, and said, 
in almost prophetic language, " Should foreigners an- 
ticipate us, they will complete the ruin of New France, 



THE PRAIRIE COUNTRY 145 

which they already hem in by their establishments of 
Virginia, Pennsylvania, New England, and Hudson's 
Bay." Several years before, having visited the Illi- 
nois country, he drew a picture of the prairies which 
may in some points serve as well to-day : " So beauti- 
ful and so fertile ; so free from forests, and so full of 
meadows, brooks, and rivers ; so abounding in fish, 
game, and venison, that one can find there in plenty, 
and with little trouble, all that is needful for the 
support of flourishing colonies." Indeed the empire 
would be built and the meadows would be made pop- 
ulous, but the founders of states would come neither 
by the Lakes nor the Gulf, — they would hew their 
way across the mountains. 

It was in 1682 that La Salle completed the discov- 
ery of the lower Mississippi and gave name to the 
Louisiana country. By the beginning of the next 
century settlements were made. One of the French 
centers of population was at Detroit, another was at 
Vincennes in the lower Wabash country, on the east- 
ern, or what is now the Indiana, side of the river ; and 
the farthest outpost of all was about Kaskaskia, in 
the river region between Cairo and St. Louis. Here 
and on the Wabash gathered several thousand French 
colonists. They were not state builders, as La Salle 
might have hoped, but lived in easy fashion, bartering 
furs, rearing their half-breed children, and tilling 
patches of the soil in their occasional hours of indus- 
try. We are not concerned with their story save to 
see how they passed, with the fall of Quebec, under 
British rule, so to remain until the close of the Revo- 
lution. Here, for a short period, was a population of 



146 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

French and of savages, governed by a foreign king, 
who was alien to both, and bitterly hostile to the 
growth of his rebellious seaboard colonies, as they 
pushed into the land north of the Ohio. Against 
this triangular and unnatural union of vacillating Cre- 
oles, savage aborigines, and wilful king, were pitted 
the backwoodsmen of Kentucky. 

These hardy souls we have met before, as they 
colonized the valleys and threaded the passes of the 
Appalachians. They had not learned to use with 
slack hand the ax and the rifle. They could travel 
light, follow a trail like a savage, and shoot sure. 
They took pride in snuffing a candle or driving a nail 
with a bullet, and two of them, not the best or noblest 
of their kind, are said to have amused themselves 
and shown their confidence in each other's skill, by 
placing a tin cup full of whiskey on the head, and 
allowing the other, at a range of seventy yards, to 
puncture it. 

The shadowy claims of Virginia and other colonies 
to this old Northwest counted for nothing against 
actual possession by British forts and British com- 
manders, and the land had to be won by successful 
war. In planting the settlements on the Kentucky 
and the Cumberland, Boone, Robertson, and the men 
and women who toiled and fought with them, had 
opened the way for the prairie realm of the future. 
They were to win it against all odds, while nations 
that approached it by other highways were to stand 
aside, and thus to bring fresh proof that geographic 
opportunity does not of necessity control. 

It is here that we meet the surveyor, frontiersman, 



THE PRAIRIE COUNTRY 147 

and soldier, George Rogers Clark. There is no finer 
story of frontier history than his. A Virginian by 
birth, a Kentuckian by adoption, he saw the prob- 
lem of the Northwest, and went back to Virginia to 
arouse the government of his native state. From 
Patrick Henry, the governor, he received a Godspeed ; 
but there was little more for the exhausted colony to 
give. Almost with single hand he raised a little 
force, took it down the Ohio, surprised Kaskaskia, 
won the French by his kindness and the savages by 
his union of fairness and defiance ; marched through 
cold floods, often breast deep, to Vincennes, and com- 
pelled its English commander with superior force to 
surrender, — this is, in brief, the dramatic story. 
Every advance of the Middle West in population, in 
wealth, and in public achievement should add to the 
fame of this simple, rough man of illimitable per- 
sonal force. His work made it easy for the new 
government to claim and hold, in the final treaties, 
the country north of the Ohio River and south of the 
Lakes, where now are Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michi- 
gan, and Wisconsin. It was, for purposes of conquest 
and occupancy, a geographical unit ; it could not be 
divided, and the winning of it was essential to the 
winning also of the Northwest that lay beyond, and 
of the great Southwest. 

Such, in its outlines, had been the history down to 
the beginning of those decades following the Revolu- 
tion, when the great rush of the people westward was 
filling the prairie lands with homes and permanent 
institutions. Before we follow these throngs along 
their line of march, or see how they adjusted their 



148 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

life to their new surroundings, we must observe these 
geographic conditions as carefully as we may, and 
we will ask the reader to note again the extent and 
borders of the land. 

Ohio on the east is scarcely upland, nor is it low- 
land, having an average altitude of between eight 
hundred and nine hundred feet. We may think of it 
as the Alleghany plateau gently declining to the west, 
or as the Mississippi plains rising on the east. It 
has exceedingly smooth lake plains on the north and 
northwest, and a line of low divides, running north of 
the middle of the state, turns the streams to Lake 
Erie and the Ohio River. These streams occupy 
valleys sunk well down into the low plateau. Ohio 
is not a prairie state ; for she never had more than 
small areas of open, treeless meadow, to which this 
name is given. Almost the whole state was origi- 
nally covered with forests of walnut, beech, maple, 
buckeye, chestnut, ash, and hickory. 

In type of surface Indiana is much like Ohio, with 
large areas in the east and south, of low plateau, 
eight hundred to more than one thousand feet in 
altitude, deeply dissected by valleys leading to the 
Ohio and the Wabash. In the central and north- 
western areas the ground is lower and often a true 
plain, but, except about one-eighth of the state, is 
not a prairie, any more than Ohio, and was largely 
covered in early days with heavy and luxuriant 
forests, mainly of a hardwood type. 

Illinois is prairie, for here La Salle found the open 
meadows with rank herbage and deep black soil, with 
shallow valleys and sluggish rivers, which belong to 



THE PRAIRIE COUNTRY 



149 



n 

o 

W 3! 
O t« 



the name. Nor are 
trees absent, but as a 
rule they border the 
rivers, growing upon 
their flood plains and 
fringing their banks 
with sprawling roots & 3" 
and overhanging foli- | § 
age. If we cross the £ § 
Mississippi River, Iowa ^ o 
is much like Illinois, % | 
for these, more than all c£ £' 
others, are the prairie % § 

CD p 

states. 

We will not vex 
ourselves with the 
unanswered question, 
whether the forestless 



o P 



-d 3. 
a* o' 

condition was due to s S 



3' H 



Indian burnings, or to £ 

qualities of soil or 8 §"■ 

climate, for it is more p 3 

to our purpose to see g ^ 

how the lands were Q ~- 

ready for the plow, 

were suited to rapid 

occupation, and were 

overswept by waves of 

human life in a small 

fraction of the time 

required to clear the forests and grub among the 

bouiders of the New England uplands. 




150 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

When we have crossed the Mississippi River at 
about five hundred feet above the sea, we begin to 
rise again, and in central and northwestern Iowa 
find ourselves more than one thousand feet in alti- 
tude. If we cross the Missouri into Nebraska, we 
rise still more, on the gentle, prolonged incline that 
will take us up to the base of the Rocky Mountains. 
As we approach the central portions of Nebraska 
the rainfall decreases, and the cornfields give way to 
less luxuriant pasture lands. Here, in a rough way, 
we may say that the prairies end. There is no 
change in the forms of the land, but only a change 
in climatic condition. Thus we see how difficult it 
is to bound geographic areas ; and yet the geogra- 
pher is right in distinguishing the Alleghany plateau, 
the prairies, and the Great Plains. But the language 
made necessary by usage is misleading. Ohio stands 
less than a thousand feet above the sea, but it is dis- 
sected by valleys and joined to higher areas on 
the east, and we call it plateau. The arid region, 
beginning in central Nebraska and Kansas, is three 
thousand feet and upward in altitude, but is little 
dissected, and is called the Great Plains. We may 
better follow, however, the newer name, High Plains. 
If it were not pedantic, we could say the undissected 
plateau east of the Rocky Mountains. The prairies 
again are always rather smooth lands, with shallow 
valleys, but some are lower and some are higher, 
while the name especially denotes watered and fertile 
areas in the forestless condition. Thus we have, in 
outline, an east and west profile of the central Missis- 
sippi region. 



THE PRAIRIE COUNTRY 151 

Missouri, to a line somewhat south of its great 
river, is much like the adjoining parts of Iowa. 
Using our definition of prairies, as a flat country, 
nearly forestless, but well enough watered for agri- 
culture, we may carry the belt through southwestern 
Wisconsin, and across southern and western Minne- 
sota and the eastern Dakotas. 

Over all this region, from Ohio into Nebraska and 
from the Ohio River through Minnesota, the Missis- 
sippi River holds sway. The single exceptions are 
the Lake slopes of the Ohio River states, and the 
valley of the Red River of the North. In its drain- 
age, therefore, the region has unity. It is a surface 
also beneath which lie, everywhere, sheets of ancient 
sandstone, limestone, and shale, referred by the geol- 
ogist to the Paleozoic era. Rarely are these beds 
disturbed, or in any way modified, except by the slow 
changes that have consolidated the muds into hard 
rocks, and raised them by continental movements a 
few hundred feet above the level of the sea. Long- 
continued denudation has stripped away the upper 
sheets to an unknown degree, and planed the rocks 
down to the strata that remain, and over which the 
products of rock decay and the glacial waste have 
been deposited. Thus the character and structure of 
the foundation rocks also lend unity to the region. 

All New England shows the effects of glaciation. 
This is true also of most of the lands with which we 
are now concerned, but with this important difference, 
that here the glacial sheets accomplished their wear 
and spread their waste upon a comparatively even 
surface. Some very smooth lands in Iowa, Illinois, 



152 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

and in northern Indiana and Ohio, are made so by 
the even spreading, under the ice sheet, of a thick 
bed of till, or boulder clay, which is the most wide- 
spread deposit of a great glacier. Often, too, the ice 
front lay along a smooth surface, and the streams 
flowing from it were sluggish, and wandered hither 
and thither, interlocking with each other, and build- 
ing up wide-spreading aprons of washed clays and 
sands. Frequently, where the ice front lay for a 
long time, belts of hills, or terminal moraines, were 
formed, and now stand as the most conspicuous re- 
liefs of a flat and often monotonous country. In 
parts of southern Iowa and northern Missouri the 
glacial cover is a clayey loam, with a peculiar vertical 
cleavage, and known as loess, similar to formations 
found in the Rhine Valley and in interior China. By 
the glacial and associated deposits, the till and sands, 
the waterlaid clays and the loess, the bed rocks may be 
completely mantled over for long distances, giving 
the particularly smooth and unrelieved aspect of much 
of the prairie region. 

But in these spreading mantles of rock waste, we 
find the secret of the soils. They have not lain on 
steep slopes of hill or mountain, where their finest 
and most available nutritive materials were washed 
away into the sea, but all the gains of weathering and 
vegetable accumulations have been hoarded through 
the thousands or tens of thousands of years of post- 
glacial time. As the surfaces were relatively smooth 
before the ice swept in, there was less plucking and 
dropping of large stones and boulders, and hence 
these do not, as in rougher glacial lands, dissipate the 



THE PRAIRIE COUNTRY 1 53 

strength of the plowman and the harvester. Nor is 
energy consumed in tilling steep hillsides. We 
have already had reason to see that the drainage of 
the Great Lakes once went down the St. Croix, the 
Wisconsin, the Illinois, and the Wabash rivers, and 
that the Ohio River is far other than it was before 
the ice invasion. Important changes, too, were 
wrought in the upper Mississippi. 

A most surprising fact about the ice sheets was 
that none of them covered southwestern Wisconsin. 
Here is a region, ten thousand miles in area, which is 
like the Blue Grass region of Kentucky, or like any 
other region outside of the glacial belt, in showing 
none of the characteristic proofs of glacial action. 
Its soils are not made from the drift, but by the decay 
of the underlying rock, while the ice sheets closed 
completely around it in Iowa and Illinois. It is not 
proved, however, that the ice was all around it at 
the same time. There may have been successive en- 
croachments, now on the east, and now on the west, 
of the "driftless area." 

It is known that some areas of original prairie have 
been reforested in Indiana since occupation by the 
white man began. It appears also that some districts 
in Kentucky had been brought to the prairie condi- 
tion shortly before civilized society took possession of 
the ancient hunting-grounds. So far, these facts are 
favorable to the view that the prairies are mainly due 
to fires kindled by the native inhabitants of the land. 
Certain it is that the horizon is more and more broken 
by woodlands, and that the beauty of the luxuriant 
ancient meadows will be in some measure restored 



154 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

in forest and field with the development of an older 
civilization. 

The prairies have their features of climate, and 
they are as sharp and peculiar as may be found in 
New England and on the Pacific coast. With little 
interruption there are lowlands from the Gulf of 
Mexico to the Arctic Sea. When south winds pre- 
vail, the heated air of the tropical belt sweeps un- 
hindered up the Mississippi and Ohio valleys, and 
the summers are intensely hot in Cincinnati and St. 
Louis, and they are not cool in Des Moines and St. 
Paul. For days at a time the thermometer in central 
Iowa may touch or pass one hundred degrees. And 
the north winds, in like fashion, take their turn, and 
bring the extreme winter temperatures of the prairies 
far below zero. The cyclonic whirls which bring the 
warm and cold waves sweep from the northwest to 
the Atlantic coast, following each other throughout 
the year, and most frequently and fiercely in the 
winter months. And in these conditions of swift 
movement of enormous masses of the atmosphere, 
develops, in the summer months, the dreaded tornado. 
It is a land of climatic extremes, but the summer 
heat, with sufficient rainfall and rich soil, brings 
great harvests, and the tonic of winter's cold is the 
more efficient because of the drier air that is charac- 
teristic of a continental interior. This is more true 
west of the Mississippi River, where the summer con- 
ditions are more favorable than they are in the Ohio 
River belt. 

The prairies display most of their natural riches in 
the form of soils, a true product of the rocks that lie 



THE PRAIRIE COUNTRY 



155 



below. Silver and gold have they none, save as they 
gain them by exchange for the wealth of their limit- 
less fields. Nor in general have they iron or other 
metallic stores. But they have one resource of the 
under-earth that will mean more and more as their 
industrial life becomes mature, — they possess, in 
thousands of square miles, beds of soft coal. In 
large measure the men of the prairies can afford to 
plow while others turn spindles and build chimneys, 
but there must also be some place for the town and 
the mill. Of waterpower nature has been sparing in 
this land of low levels and little relief, but she has 
been generous with her stores of fuel, and hence the 
central West will not be given over to a monotony of 
cornfields and grain drills, of threshing-machines and 
elevators. She can have, in some degree, the diver- 
sity which will provide for both her wealth and her 
culture. 

If we consider the people that were to work out its 
destiny, the Northwest Territory was unoccupied at 
the close of the War of Independence. There was 
no settled community of white men in what is now 
the state of Ohio ; unless, indeed, the Moravian mis- 
sionary settlements of 1772 be counted an exception. 
But this entire region was in the track of the great 
migrations of the next thirty years, and its soil and 
its rivers attracted the first and larger share of these 
early colonists. Extending from the Lake to the 
Ohio River, Ohio must be the avenue of all who 
crossed the Appalachian barrier north of the Cum- 
berland Gap. If they came by the Mohawk Valley, 
they would skirt the southern shore of the Lakes and 



i 5 6 



GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 



enter Ohio on the north. If they followed the roads 
laid out in Maryland and Pennsylvania, they would 
touch the Ohio River at Pittsburg or Wheeling, and 
enter the region from the south. The first immi- 
grants followed the latter route, for they went out 
under the Ohio Company, and in 1788 took possession 




Fig. 31. River Front at Cincinnati. 



of the land where the Muskingum from the north 
enters the Ohio River. Fort Harmer had already 
been built on the west side of the smaller river, and 
the settlers occupied the east bank and founded Ma- 
rietta. As with other communities transplanted from 
the East, the traditions of the old home were strong, 
and the sons of the pioneers, in 1833, founded the 
school which soon became the Marietta College, thus 
naturalizing, so far as they could, the spirit of Har- 
vard and Yale on the Ohio River. 



THE PRAIRIE COUNTRY 157 

Blockhouses were built at Losantiville in 1780, and 
settlers later came in from New England, New Jersey, 
and the South. This was far down the Ohio, almost 
to the mouth of the Miami. This outpost in the 
western wilderness was soon to be known as Cincin- 
nati ; and Moses Cleaveland, a few years later, planted 
the northern center of the Ohio region at the mouth 
of the Cuyahoga. By the year 1803 so many people 
had come in that Ohio was admitted as a state in the 
Union, and the empire between the Lakes and the Ohio 
was fairly begun ; but it seemed to be thriving at the 
expense of the East. When foreign trade was active, 
the people employed, and money plenty, the rush to 
the West fell off. But when stagnation ruled on the 
seaboard, the farmers, mechanics, and laborers sold 
their homes, gathered up what they could, took their 
children and their goods, in wagons, in carts, and on 
their backs, and began their weary march from Maine, 
Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the central Atlantic 
country to the land of promise beyond the mountains. 
There fields could be had for little more than the 
clearing and tilling, there the soil had unheard-of 
richness, there they would not be put in prison for 
debt, and there they and their children could start 
life afresh. 

McMaster has gathered from many sources the 
records and incidents of this early rush across New 
York and Pennsylvania. 1 From a little Pennsylva- 
nia village on the road to Pittsburg, it was reported 
that a month in 181 1 saw the passage of two hundred 
and thirty-six wagons, with nearly two thousand per- 

1 " History of the People of the United States," IV, Ch. XXXIII. 



158 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

sons, toward Ohio. Similar stories were told from 
Auburn and elsewhere in New York. Mount Pleas- 
ant in Ohio, from a trivial beginning in 1810, had five 
hundred people five years later. One hundred and 
twenty people, from one town in Maine, passed Hav- 
erhill, Mass., in a single day, and the westward move- 
ment not only stirred the East with fear, but took 
such proportions in Great Britain as there also to 
arouse alarm. 

In the clearing of the forest, in the rude log-cabin, 
in the poverty of food and clothing, and in all the 
hardships of the frontier, the early days of Ohio com- 
pare with New York or Massachusetts. It was not 
a prairie state which could be overrun with a plow 
in a decade. 1 

Almost the same story is to be told of Indiana, but 
it came a little later. She already had a populous 
settlement on the Wabash, but its interest was in the 
past rather than the future. In her present territory 
there were twenty-five hundred settlers in 1800; 
but there were twenty-four thousand in 18 10, and 
seventy thousand in 18 16, when she came to statehood. 
The state had been entered along the three great 
lines of movement, controlled by geographic features, 
and now become familiar to us. The first was along 
the Mohawk Valley and the Lakes, and the stream 
was soon to become a flood, with the finishing of the 
Erie Canal. The second approach was by the new 
National Road, crossing the Ohio River at Wheeling, 
marked along its course in Ohio by Zanesville, Colum- 

1 The story is well told by King, " Ohio," in " American Common- 
wealths," Ch. XI. 



THE PRAIRIE COUNTRY 1 59 

bus, and Springfield, and entering Indiana at Rich- 
mond. The third entrance was from the Kentucky 
and Cumberland settlements, crossing the Ohio River 
and coming in on the south. 

Illinois had about the same white population in 
1800 as her eastern neighbor, and was but two years 
behind in her admission to the Union, since this took 
place before the close of 18 18. It was but a step to 
cross the Mississippi. There had long been on its 
western banks a mongrel population of Spaniard, 
French, Indians, and negroes, and St. Louis had 
been a fur-trading post since 1764. But the great 
inrush followed upon the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, 
the year in which Lewis and Clark set out from 
St. Louis on their western exploration. But here, as 
north of the Ohio, the permanent settlers came from 
the East. That East, however, was not all on the 
Atlantic slope, for the sons of the Kentucky back- 
woodsmen were moving on. More than that, and 
as if typical of the march westward, Boone himself 
crossed the Mississippi, lived many years, and in 1820 
died on the borders of the Missouri River. 

In 1 8 19 Jacob Astor made St. Louis the center of 
his western fur trade, and in 1821, after stormy times, 
Missouri became a member of the Union. 

At length the stream of population crossed the 
Mississippi farther to the north and laid the founda- 
tions of Iowa. Once a part of Louisiana, later under 
the wing of Michigan and then of Wisconsin, she 
was herself to surrender Minnesota and the Dakotas, 
and in 1846, ten years before a railway crossed the 
Mississippi, join the sisterhood of states. Iowa has 



160 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

been called Mesopotamia, and another river crossing 
set the home seekers over the Missouri, and sent them 
on the lbng up-stream trails, by the Platte and the 
Missouri, that have peopled Nebraska and the Da- 
kotas, and carried the dominion of man to the foot 
of the western mountains. We may call it about an 
even century from the time when Boone struck into 
the Ohio Valley to the day when populous states 
filled the basin of the Mississippi. 

In the eighteenth century the long struggle for the 
Northwest lay between the East and the Northeast. 
From the latter realm on the St. Lawrence it had 
been ruled first by the French and then by the British, 
with the always uncertain savage now in one balance 
and then in another. George Rogers Clark, at Kas- 
kaskia and Vincennes, drove the wedge that split the 
Northwest from the Northeast, and the settlers that 
poured through the gateways of the Appalachians 
cemented it to the young nation on the east. 

It has been left for the nineteenth century to see 
whether the prairie country would be tied by the 
closer bonds to the East or the South, and the answer 
is not yet given. On the whole, geography favors 
the South, and there are signs that she may win, or 
at least divide the spoils of commerce. In those older 
days, when the frontier was on the western slopes of 
the Alleghany plateau, both the East and the West 
shared in the fight for freedom. In the East the 
more disciplined armies of the thirteen colonies fought 
the armies of Great Britain. In the West the fiercer 
fighters of the backwoods won the lowlands of the 
Mississippi in the critical inch of time that saved the 



THE PRAIRIE COUNTRY l6l 

interior for the Republic. There was enough to do ; 
there was a common foe, and no time for jealousy. 
But when the war was over, the problems of state- 
hood and of commerce presented themselves, and the 
Appalachian barrier and the trend of Mississippi 
waters asserted their power. The conservative East 
felt that the seaboard had won the struggle, and that 
her wisdom and her sound judgment were not to be 
sacrificed to the rough instincts and growing vote of 
the untutored men across the mountains. 

It was not easy to persuade Virginia, in the first 
years of peace, that she should voluntarily release 
her subjects, as she regarded them, across the moun- 
tains. Nor was it a light task in the face of Indian 
outbreaks, and the real or supposed neglect of the 
mother state, to check the self-reliant, and, in some 
cases, turbulent men, that were for breaking away 
and setting up an empire in Kentucky. All the 
motives were hammered to white heat by the talk of 
cutting off the navigation of the Mississippi. The 
cleared patches and prairie glades of the Ohio coun- 
try were beginning to produce more than the hominy 
needed to feed the pioneer. The trails across the 
mountains might do as a toilsome road to come in by, 
but they were no highway to a market. New Eng- 
land and the East had no care about boating down 
the Mississippi. They would be content to preserve 
the favor of the king of Spain ; but not so the Ken- 
tucky pioneer, who knew that the water flowed freely 
to the Gulf, who had timber for flatboats, and produce 
that he could market in New Orleans, but for a for- 
eign king and a selfish New England. Nor was he 

M 



162 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

brought to calmness of spirit when one of his bold 
fellows had taken a flatboat of flour and utensils 
down the river, had seen it confiscated by Spanish 
officers at Natchez, had toiled home by land, and had 
spread over all the transmontane country the story of 
his wrongs. Such in brief were the conditions, and 
they were chiefly geographic, that almost carried the 
West and Southwest to Spanish intrigue and to sepa- 
ration from the states that adopted the Constitution. 

But in 1796 a treaty with Spain opened the trade 
of the Mississippi River, and in 1803 this source of 
possible disunion was removed by the purchase of 
Louisiana. But federal writers in the East rung 
the changes on the folly and iniquity of this vast 
expansion into remote and alien regions. In particu- 
lar was the extravagance of the purchase denounced ; 
fifteen millions of dollars for the South and the far 
West! 

When the wheels of statehood and of expansion 
had been set upon their course, the problems of com- 
merce still arose between the East and West, and 
they still grew out of the physiography. Water ran 
downhill, and it was hard to make roads and drag 
food and clothing and other things across mountains. 
Hence arose those disturbed cries of Washington and 
other statesmen of the East, for landways and water- 
ways across the barrier, and thus followed that gene- 
ration of way-making which has already engaged our 
attention. When steam had fully established itself 
on the Ohio and the Mississippi, and the railroads 
had not come, it would seem that the domain of New 
Orleans and the South should be complete, and the 



THE PRAIRIE COUNTRY 163 

prairies become linked to the Gulf of Mexico. But 
there were at least two causes which threatened, and 
indeed almost destroyed, the growing and natural 
union of the north and south Mississippi country. 
One of these causes lay in the interests which led up 
by a long road to the Civil War, severing the two sec- 
tions by loss of sympathy and by several years of 
actual hostility. The other was the construction of 
through lines of railway, along easy grades, with 
swift service, between the prairies and the seaboard. 
To this of course was added the growth of Lake 
commerce in connection with railways and canals, 
and the fact which counts for something, that the 
Atlantic ports are nearer Europe than are those of 
the Gulf. With these great unfoldings in the North 
has gone a relative decline in Mississippi River com- 
merce, and of St. Louis, as compared with Chicago. 

But will not the pendulum swing and carry the 
central states to their natural fellowship with their 
southern neighbors, giving to geographic conditions 
their proper control again ? Not alone for men 
is the Mississippi Valley an open road. Professor 
Shaler has made reference to the resemblances of 
the animals and the plants for long distances north 
and south in that country, and to the alternate do- 
minion of tropic heat and arctic cold. The harvest- 
ers follow ripening wheat fields from south to north, 
and the valley is marked out for unity and inter- 
change. Not long hence the prairies may supply 
the Orient through an isthmian canal ; and even a 
half-dozen years ago we were bidden to look upon 
the new commercial alliance of the West and the 



1 64 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

South, along railways that will carry the surplus prod- 
ucts of Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma to Galves- 
ton or some other Gulf city by a haul five hundred 
miles shorter than lies between any of these states 
and the Atlantic. These projects will be immensely 
favored as the South develops its manufactures and 
can provide thus for a haul both ways, making rail- 
way traffic profitable, and so much cheaper South 
than East, that the extra carriage by ship across the 
Gulf need not be considered. This " probably means 
decreased revenues for the eastern traffic lines and 
the related industries, but unless the judgment of the 
West is at fault, it means better times for the plains. 
The East may as well realize that its child has come 
to the years of maturity and is acting for itself." 1 
Galveston is nearer by more than two hundred miles 
to central Iowa than is New York, and there are not 
wanting signs that here also the north and south 
lines of movement will in the end be lines of control. 
Whatever the adjustment be, it will be achieved in 
another generation, but the prophet may well be 
cautious, in view of the unforeseen and unforeseeable 
expansion of artificial waterways. 

Passing by the hundred years of fugitive French 
and British occupation, we may say that the whole 
West is a product of four generations : it has grown 
since the War of Independence, and the oldest state 
north of the Ohio River, reaches this year its hun- 
dredth birthday. There is no history here, in the 
ordinary sense of the term ; we have no perspective 
when we look back, for we are yet in the midst of 

1 Charles Moreau Harger, No. Amer. Rev., CLXV, 383, 1897. 



THE PRAIRIE COUNTRY 1 65 

things ; and difficult as it always is to separate geo- 
graphic from other causes, here our perplexities are 
multiplied, for there has not been time to work out 
the problems, or, if we may say it, such has been the 
stirring, that the waters have had no time to clear 
and let us look to the bottom. 

It has been lately said that the East is not the 
parent of the West, that New England and New 
York need not boast of so lusty a child, for the South 
is the real mother. But this is rhetoric, no doubt 
pleasant to the writer, and as full of fallacy as rhet- 
oric often is. The door was opened by the South, if 
it was the South that lived on the Holston, the Ken- 
tucky, and the Cumberland, and sent forth Boone, 
Robertson, Sevier, and George Rogers Clark. But 
we have followed the streams of western migration 
with little attention, and have read the story of the 
Mississippi Valley to little purpose, if we do not see 
that the later fabric, warp and filling, was woven 
from the East. It was New England and New York 
that were transplanted to Ohio, Illinois, and Iowa. 
But Ohio and Iowa did not become a second New 
England. The stress of a thousand miles of change 
will strain the most rigid institutions and mold cus- 
tom and thought into new shapes, even though the 
material is much the same. Some things were uncon- 
sciously lost in the journey along the Seneca Turn- 
pike or the Erie Canal, and other things were as 
unwittingly taken on from the soil and free air of the 
prairies. There were no hills to confine the view, 
and by a very old law, if newly recognized, a change 
of environment was modifying ancient organs and 



166 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

unfolding new ones. The East is the parent of the 
West, but children are different from their parents, 
and not seldom outgrow them. "Blue laws" could 
hardly flourish in Illinois, where an exhaustless soil 
bloomed with glorious color in native meadows, only 
waiting for the plow to yield a more substantial har- 
vest. Nor were there veins of gold or silver, to lure 
thousands of daring adventurers and herd them in 
mushroom cities, where restraint would be abandoned 
and the worst passions would thrive unhindered. 
Rather, from the crowded nursery, with its thin soil 
and doubtful climate, there was a great transplanting, 
and the prairies gave depth and room and sunlight. 
We may take Iowa as a typical prairie common- 
wealth. Down to 1840 her place in the census is a 
blank : then she records a little more than forty 
thousand people; by i860 she had gained a popula- 
tion of nearly seven hundred thousand, and at the 
close of the century was the tenth state in the Union, 
with more than two millions. With this throng of 
inhabitants, she has one city that passes the limit 
of sixty thousand. But three others exceed thirty 
thousand : Iowa is a rural state. A recent writer 
has perhaps done full justice to the virtues and to the 
limitations of Iowa : 1 " She is a huge overflow meet- 
ing, thronged with the second generation of middle- 
westerners." So uniform and rich are her soils that 
scarce an acre in the whole domain need run to 
waste. Tillage was easy, and the only serious trials 
in the early days were the prairie fires and the diffi- 
cult transportation. The latter was solved, as it 

K'The Iowans," R. L. Hartt, Atlantic Monthly, 1900. 



THE PRAIRIE COUNTRY 



167 



seemed, by the railways ; but when the short hauls 
became more costly than the long ones, Iowa " went 
to grass," saved her soils from running out, and so 
concentrated her grains into beef and butter that she 
suffered less at the hands of the railways, and had 
still before her, as we have seen, an open way to the 




Fig. 32. Shade on the Prairies. Cottonwoods in Iowa. 

ports on the Gulf. Our writer brings to us another's 
epitome of Scotland, — " Scott, Burns, heather, whisky, 
and religion," — and then gives us his own for Iowa, 
"corn, cow, and hog." But we will not let him be 
misunderstood. He does not charge this great com- 
monwealth with dirt and materialism. She may have 
no history and not yet any material for fiction, but 
"industry, morality, intelligence, and loyalty," these 
are hers ; and "when your soul is bent upon finding a 



1 68 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

happy augury for your country's future, what better 
can you seek? " 

Such traits we may ascribe in part to the type of 
men and women that would be attracted to such a 
land to found a home, and in part to steady fellow- 
ship with the soil and sky, remote from cities, and 
set apart to simple and single interests. But the 
growth of railways did not merely bring an outlet for 
surplus hoards of grain ; it brought inevitable contact 
with the outside world, and the prairies have not been 
behind in their crop of social and political ideas. No 
state in the last generation has been more prolific 
of public men than Iowa. Prevalent agriculture and 
the absence of mountains do not mean sordid purpose 
or narrow vision. The prairies have their own ex- 
pansiveness and may lure the eye to the horizon 
when older countries are looking at their own garden 
patch. A cluster of great universities has grown in 
the states of the old Northwest. Nowhere has the 
state fostered the higher education with so steady 
and so generous a hand. And the small colleges, 
often too small and too many, have expressed and 
met the needs of the time, and the fittest will survive. 
A score of others might be named where we choose 
one, once a small college, now grown large, — Ober- 
lin, a type of the western school, preserving the in- 
tegrity and faith of New England, and truly western 
in its free, modern organization of courses of education. 

In political ideas, also, the prairies have not seldom 
shown the freedom and erratic energy of the frontier, 
but have invariably swung toward the poise and 
secure verdicts that are at once as sound and safe as 



THE PRAIRIE COUNTRY 169 

those of the East, and yet have in them the promise 
of the future and the courage of action. At first the 
westerner belonged to the debtor class, and if condi- 
tions pressed, he was restless and radical, and impa- 
tient with the lenders of the East. It is the land of 
summer heat and winter cold, with a tornado now 
and then thrown in, prairie breaths of populism and 
fiat money, but in the end a nursery of ideas, sound 
and progressive, outgrowing the vagaries of an infant 
state, but free from the satisfied conceit and sullen 
cocksureness of older communities. The man of the 
prairie is ready for action at home or abroad, bal- 
anced by. a reasonable culture and poised by an expe- 
rience whose lessons he does not leave to be learned 
by his grandsons. Mr. Frederick J. Turner in an 
excellent discussion of "The Problem of the West," 1 
quotes the assertion of Mr. Bryce, " the West is the 
most American part of America," and admits that 
there is force in the claim that if there is a section- 
alism in this country, it is eastern; for "the old 
West, united to the new South, would produce, not a 
new sectionalism, but a new Americanism." 

If we could follow the details of history in these 
central states, the illustrations of physiographic con- 
trol would perhaps be as common as they are in New 
England or New York, unless for this reason, that 
along the railroads of the prairies towns have been 
laid out with reference to convenient intervals and 
sometimes in the complete absence of determining 
local features. No town was ever so fortunate in a 
change of name as Cincinnati, whose early appella- 

1 Atlantic Monthly, September, 1896, 



lyo GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

tion was the unhappy invention of a schoolmaster, 
L(icking)os-antiville, a thrice mongrel compound, 
meaning the town opposite the mouth of the 
Licking. 

Like every town by the water, it has come to be 
the center of many railways, and will retain its great- 
ness though it must now divide its honors with the 
city by the Lakes. Columbus has no conspicuous 
geographic causes lying behind its prosperity. It is 
indeed on the Scioto, it is in the midst of a rich 
region, but most of all, it is in the center of a rich 
state and is its capital. It is in part, therefore, due to 
political causes, and may be briefly dismissed by the 
geographer. The state has twenty-eight towns of 
more than ten thousand people, and is thus full of 
such local centers of trade as must always develop 
in a great agricultural state. The same is true of 
Indiana and every upper Mississippi commonwealth. 
Indianapolis, indeed, is much smaller than the twin 
cities of Ohio, but added more than sixty thousand 
to her numbers in the last decade. Like Columbus, 
she is on a small river, the geographical and political 
center of a great state, and sends her railways in 
every direction. Louisville had its beginning in a 
ledge of limestone in the bed of a river, and in the 
need of portage, at low water, around the rather high- 
sounding " Falls of the Ohio." It is a river town, 
therefore, as well as the metropolis of a state. 

St. Louis cannot run in the race with the city by 
Lake Michigan, yet may hope for great and per- 
manent development as a river town. She is on the 
Mississippi ; is almost at the mouth of the Missouri ; 



THE PRAIRIE COUNTRY 



71 



is on the future highway between the prairies and the 
Gulf, and is in the line of traffic moving between the far 
Northeast and the far Southwest, and she is at the 
same time the chief city of a state. Save for Chicago, 
Illinois is a state of local communities of modest size, 
and Wisconsin has no interior town of thirty thousand 
people. These conditions are altogether favorable 




Fig. 33. Library and Campus of the University of Nebraska. 



for the growth of a strong and clean civilization, saved 
from the dearth of rural life by the school, the free 
delivery of mails, and every other means of constant 
and swift communication. Minnesota has no popu- 
lation centers that compare with Minneapolis and St. 
Paul, though Duluth, with her fifty thousand people, 
is a rival in the volume of her business. Aside from 
these three, Minnesota has but two towns of more 



1/2 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

than ten thousand people, and is distinctly a rural 
commonwealth. 

Across the river from Iowa is Nebraska, and Omaha 
its metropolis. It represents the second tier of states 
beyond the Mississippi, prairie on the east and arid on 
the west. It is like its eastern neighbor in its soils, 
— fine, deep, level, and easily tilled, — and in its domi- 
nant agriculture, for its factories are yet to be built. 
Like Iowa, Nebraska has learned to pasture some of 
its lands, but here the division is a geographic or cli- 
matic one. She found to her sorrow that corn could 
not regularly be grown west of the middle of the state, 
and hence adjusted herself to environment, by pastur- 
ing the west and plowing the east ; and like Iowa, 
also, she is learning the routes that lead southward, and 
the bulk of her corn goes to New Orleans. Typical 
of the progress of this young and physically monot- 
onous state, her state University gathers at Lincoln 
two thousand of her sons and daughters, and takes no 
place inferior to cattle or corn in the hearts of the 
citizen of the plains. 



CHAPTER VI 

COTTON, RICE, AND CANE 

If any reader is disposed to think a blunder has 
been made in choosing a head-line, no offense will be 
taken and no defense made. Grain, lumber, and iron 
would do just as well, and perhaps better, and both 
together would be better still, for they tell us at the 
beginning of the old South and the new. Never until 
now has nature rightly had her way in the Gulf coun- 
try, but she is fast winning her hold, and that process 
of adjustment of man to the earth, which takes place 
in all lands, is here coming about in a day. 

The Atlantic plains of tide-water Virginia continue 
through the Carolinas and merge with like plains 
about the Gulf. They seem to be separate from each 
other because the long peninsula of Florida runs so 
far down into the half-tropical seas, making an out- 
side and an inside realm. But, in a general way, a 
description of Virginia or South Carolina would an- 
swer for Alabama or Texas ; for all have outer low- 
lands and inner uplands. The uplands differ greatly 
in height and character. South Carolina has little 
mountain land like Virginia, and no great plateaus 
like Texas, but they all have the coastal plain, and to 
the geologist the coastal plain is young, wherever 
found. Its beds are undisturbed, its surfaces are low 

*73 



174 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

and flat, its rocks are soft, and its rivers often entered 
by the tides. 

The characteristic South of the old days has grown 
upon this lowland belt, bordering the sea. South 
Carolina would be as good an example as we could 
find, for her rivers cross the Piedmont plateau, and, 
on a dividing line about five hundred feet above the 
sea, enter the plain belt, and reach the open sea 
through tidal inlets. The coastal plain makes two- 
thirds of the state and is more than twice as large as 
Massachusetts. 

In many ways the local life and industries have 
long been fitted to the land. Sea-island cotton, rice, 
and truck farming find their place on the marshy 
plains and low islands of the coast. Between the 
plain and the plateau is a belt of sandy country, 
twenty miles wide or more, and the " sand-hillers " 
live in ignorance and share the poverty of the soil. 
The " black belt " is along the seaboard plain, for 
here the cotton, rice, and indigo were grown which 
made slave labor profitable, often a toil in swamps 
which the white man was unwilling or unable to en- 
dure. Here the blacks vastly outnumber the whites, 
while in the colder northwest corner of the state, with 
its poorer soil, its cooler climate, and its absence of 
rice and cotton, the whites are threefold more numer- 
ous than the colored people. 

As in the North Carolina lowlands, the railways 
often run straight toward their destination, as unhin- 
dered by physiographic barriers as on the plains of 
Nebraska. The shore-line of South Carolina, broken 
like that of Virginia, drew the colonists and gave dis- 



176 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

tinction to its early history. Even if Florida had not 
been under Spanish rule, she was farther away, and 
her eastern coast-line was less inviting to emigrants 
from the more northern peoples of Europe. Georgia 
was a kind of afterthought to South Carolina, as popu- 
lation extended across the Savannah River westward. 

North Carolina is as rich in the gifts of her plains 
and mountains as her neighbors on the north and 
south. She has her wide stretch of coastal lowlands, 
with their fertile soils and genial climate, her Pied- 
mont area of field and forest, and her magnificent 
mountains. But these counted for little at first, for 
the land does not present the right front to the sea. 
The long sand reef that culminates in Hatteras, and 
the fitful seas outside, cut off easy approach to the 
mainland; there is no swift retiring, as at Charleston 
or Cape Henry, into safe and protected waters. Ra- 
leigh's colony on Roanoke Island was earlier than 
any settlement in Virginia or South Carolina, but it 
did not last, and North Carolina became in the end a 
resort for the poorer and less intelligent colonists who 
came to the greater northern neighbor. She was, 
as Fiske has described her, a kind of backwoods ap- 
pendage to Virginia. Ignorance, thriftlessness, and 
disorder long reigned, and it took the colony genera- 
tions to recover from the unhappy conditions of her 
early days and become in the end a commonwealth 
worthy of her domain. All this follows upon the low 
and sandy rampart which she put in front of the 
waters of Albemarle and Pamlico. 

Florida is altogether a part of the coastal plain, 
with its low-lying lands and its thousand miles of sea- 



COTTON, RICE, AND CANE 177 

coast Nowhere is there a surface more than a few 
hundred feet above the level of the sea, and all of its 
rocks belong to late periods of geological time. From 
the geologist's point of view, one does not go far back 
to find the Atlantic shore sweeping around by the 
Fall Line through South Carolina and Georgia into 
Alabama, leaving vast tracts of open ocean, where 
Florida now lies. The old sea bottom has been 
raised, by the broadest and lowest sort of an arch 
that can be imagined, to form the wide, flat peninsula 
that now divides the Gulf of Mexico from the Atlantic 
waters. Physically so youthful, it is also by far the 
youngest of the Atlantic states in the growth of civ- 
ilization, even though the oldest civilized settlement 
in the United States is on its eastern shore. But this 
backwardness has no physiographic origin, unless in 
the rather roundabout reason that the seas brought 
the Spaniard here for a long and repressive rule. 
Great Britain held Florida for a few years before and 
after the war of the Revolution, and in spite of her 
awkward handling of her American colonies is cred- 
ited with more advance for Florida than the Spaniard 
made in two hundred years. No doubt many who 
have looked with keen feeling upon American doings 
in Cuba have forgotten, or never knew, that Spain 
ceded Florida to the United States as late as the year 
1 82 1. Great towns have always been few in the 
South, and Florida is in this more southern than most 
of her neighbors, for she has but four communities of 
more than five thousand people. Tampa, Pensacola, 
and Key West range from fifteen thousand to eigh- 
teen thousand, and the metropolis is Jacksonville, with 



178 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

a little less than thirty thousand, but known far be- 
yond most northern towns of its own size. 

That the town will give way to the country in 
Florida for a long time, and perhaps for all time, 
may well be believed. She has little water-power, 
few mineral deposits, and no coal. The only doubt- 
ful element would seem to be in her commercial op- 
portunities, which may be very great in the changes 
that are coming in and about the American Mediter- 
ranean. The geographer meets a full share of excep- 
tions to his rules, and one of these comes to light in 
the flat stretches of this peninsula. He is likely to 
say that thousands of lakes betoken the recent inva- 
sion of ice. But no ice invasion has touched Florida, 
— nothing colder than killing frosts, — and yet the 
lakes, in thousands, are here, due, it seems, to the sol- 
vent action of water upon the soft limestones of the 
upraised sea-floor. 

And when one goes along the sluggish rivers 
and lagoons that lie back of the low barriers of the 
shore, or tries to pierce the thickets of the Everglade 
swamps, or sees the mangroves dropping their pen- 
dent branches to root in the shallow water, or counts 
the coral keys that link Key West to the mainland, 
he knows that he is seeing a continent in the mak- 
ing, he has caught the weaver at his work, and about 
him lies a new fabric, with an unfamiliar stitch and 
a fresh pattern. 

And after all, Florida is not so much unlike the 
other commonwealths of the South. She is a little 
more tropical, but is not singular in the fields of cot- 
ton, cane, and corn, or in the enormous forests of live 



l8o GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

oak and pine that afford about half of the annual 
product of the region. Oranges and pineapples are 
a little more her own. Florida is something more 
than a sanitarium for Northern victims of consump- 
tion and nervous prostration. The North regards 
Florida as a comfortable refuge from the blizzards 
and cold fogs of what is often called spring in those 
higher latitudes, but when the overcoat has been 
thrown off, the tourist among the live oaks and droop- 
ing mosses may not detect the thrill of business and of 
new thought that has reached this Land's End. Alli- 
gators and even orange orchards are not likely to 
monopolize a state which has a thousand miles of in- 
dented shore-line and thirty-five hundred miles of rail- 
road, with warm skies, rich soil, and plentiful rainfall. 
Geologists are familiar with an ancient outline of 
our southern shore, which comes to mind when men- 
tion is made of the Mississippi embayment. This 
means that sea-waters covered the regions of the 
lower Mississippi as far north as the mouth of the 
Ohio River, while a great peninsula of older Appala- 
chian land came down as far as middle Alabama and 
Georgia. On the west, too, older lands reached into 
Arkansas. The southern half of all the Gulf states, 
and all of Florida, had not yet come into being, and 
the broad, deep gulf of the Mississippi included parts 
of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Arkansas. Two great 
lobes of ancient land flanked the embayment. This 
gulf has filled up, the whole shore-line has moved 
southward by half the width of the southern tier of 
states, and Florida is a new land thrown in. And all 
this young land is coastal plain, continuous around to 



COTTON, RICE, AND CANE l8l 

New Jersey. There is one exception worth mention, 
and that is the lowland bordering the Mississippi 
River. In the old days of the embayment the delta 
of the Mississippi lay below the site of Cairo ; and it 
has been moving a little farther south ever since that 
time. The older sea muds of the delta region have 
been covered up by the muds that came from the 
prairies and the Rocky Mountains, so that if we dig 
or bore in the delta we should be apt to find wood 
and seeds and bones from the land, while if we dig 
farther west or east we shall find marine shells and 
other organic growths of the sea. 

The Appalachian uplands are even now like a pen- 
insula, — they are a mass of mountain and plateau, 
reaching out into a plain. In the peninsula the 
rocks are either folded, or at least much uplifted and 
hard. In the plain the beds are flat and low and 
soft. The typical South is this never ending stretch 
of coastal plain ; the opportunity of the South is in 
its closeness to the useful things on and in the earth 
within the upland. 

In the old days the Arkansas River had its own 
opening into the sea, and so also did the Red, and what- 
ever represented the Tennessee. But as the gulf 
filled up, and the edge of the sea was pushed south- 
ward, these rivers were joined to the main trunk, so 
that the Mississippi was growing, roughly speaking, 
like a tree, at its roots, at its outmost boughs, and by 
the grafting on of full-grown branches. 

Every great river in its lower course spreads down 
much of the waste that it has gathered in its upland 
flow. Some of the mud sinks, regardless of the slack 



1 82 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

current, far within the banks, and the rest goes out to 
sea. Every overflow carries the waste widely out on 
the bottom-lands and builds them up, — the flood 
plains of the river. The Mississippi has its thousands 
of miles of these bottom-lands, sloping off from the 
edge of the river, which drops more waste close by 
than it does farther away, and, by silting its bed, comes 
at length to flow on a broad, low ridge of its own 
making. So we can understand how a break in a 
levee sends the waters rushing over vast fields of the 
lower lands. 

Of the ten Southern states that border the sea, 
three, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida, belong 
almost wholly to the coastal plain, and they are 
throughout low, flat, and young, while all the rest 
share in the older uplands that lie behind. The 
average elevation of Louisiana is seventy-five feet, 
and no point within the state is five hundred feet 
above the sea. There are twenty thousand miles of 
river lands, and coast swamps and shallow lakes 
abound, either lagoons shut off from the Gulf by low 
barriers, or cut-off lakes left by the wide migrations 
of the fitful river upon its flood plain and delta. As 
we might expect in such a land, Florida has but one 
mineral of importance, — the phosphates ; and Louisi- 
ana likewise has one, — rock-salt. 

The lower Mississippi was to see many changes 
before it should come to its final place as the southern 
gateway of a modern and united nation. The Span- 
iard would come to it first, and, yielding it more than 
once to the French, would release his final claim 
almost three hundred years later. Twice after it be- 



COTTON, RICE, AND CANE 1 83 

came, in 1803, a part of the American Union it would 
be the scene of bloody strife, and only now, as the 
twentieth century is coming in, is the Louisiana coun- 
try entering upon the heritage which nature has 
always held in trust for it. Thus far the accidents of 
foreign intrigue and the bonds of a social system 
have laid their restraints upon the land. But now 
the Gulf plains will be joined to the prairies, the ad- 
joining seas are held in friendly and progressive 
keeping, the isthmus is to be opened, and New 
Orleans should become a southern rival of the ports 
of the East. 

The French stamp now borne by the region was 
given to it in 1700, when Iberville came from the 
North and planted his colony. La Salle had tried to 
do what his later countryman did, and in the attempt 
had come to his tragic end. In the North and in the 
South, from Minnesota to the Gulf, this race has left 
the marks of its enterprise and daring, but nowhere 
has the impress been so deep and so lasting as in 
New Orleans. Thirty-eight years of Spain, from 
1762 to 1800, made little difference, and then Louisi- 
ana came back by secret treaty to France, only to be 
transferred by Napoleon to the new power in the 
West in 1803. 

The Exposition at St. Louis will commemorate 
this sale, and will, perhaps, recall to some that the 
Louisiana of that bargain was a narrow strip as now 
on the Gulf, but widened on the Red River, leaped 
westward again along the Arkansas, and then took 
in everything between the Mississippi River and the 
Rockv Mountains up to the British boundary. 



1 84 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

The backwoodsmen of the Appalachians had won 
Kentucky and then the prairies, and now had faced 
the issue which led to the acquirement of the west 
bank of the Mississippi and the Great Plains. If we 
had not bought this great land, we must in the end 
have fought for it, for a river is no natural boundary 
between peoples. It may be difficult to cross it in 
face of an enemy, and national pride may sigh for 
such a border, as France for the Rhine, but rivers 
join more than they divide, and tend to concentrate 
the life that resides upon their opposing slopes. 
When, therefore, Jefferson bought Louisiana first, 
and patched up the Constitution afterward, and, in 
the same year, sent Lewis and Clark to spy out the 
new estate and go to the Pacific, he was following 
the law of reason and of nature. 

The river affects the life of the people in very 
direct ways, and, leaving out the phenomena of the 
atmosphere, is less easily subdued by man than any 
other natural feature of our domain. Many years 
ago Captain Eads devised and planted jetties at one 
of the mouths of the Mississippi, thus narrowing the 
channel, making the flow more rapid, and turning 
the waters into a kind of broom for the maintenance 
of navigation. Levees are built which restrain the 
flood, save in exceptional years, and the forewarning 
of the Weather Bureau adds another element of secu- 
rity to those who live below the level of the river 
waters. But we may well doubt whether man can 
ever harness the river with a sure hand. The Mis- 
sissippi often flows beneath the bluffs that rise from 
her waters on the east. She has made these bluffs 



1 86 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

by encroachment and undermining. Because bluff 
and stream adjoin each other at certain places, cities 
have grown at these eastern bends, — Memphis, 
Natchez, and Vicksburg. But the river is quite 
capable of forsaking her children by swinging widely 
to the westward, and it is at least an open question 
whether man could prevent, or afterward reverse, 
such a change. It is the willful behavior of the 
lower river, indeed, which brings in the only grave 
query as to the future water commerce of the Lake 
regions and the Gulf. About boats drawing a few 
feet of water there need be no fear, for skillful pilots 
from Mark Twain's day until now can " learn the 
river." Nor does New Orleans as a seaport depend 
upon the meanders of the stream, save as the prod- 
uce of the north might in some measure be diverted 
along lines of rail to other Gulf centers. 

Mr. Robert T. Hill, who, more than anyone else, 
has been the geographer of Texas, has drawn in a 
few strong lines a picture of her greatness. She is 
as large as France ; or she is equal to the Eastern 
and Middle states, with Maryland, Kentucky, and 
Ohio thrown in. She has one-third of the Gulf coast 
of the United States, and to cross her territory from 
east to west by rail would accomplish one-third of 
the distance from Cape Hatteras to Cape Mendocino, 
or take one from New York to Savannah, Chicago, 
or Labrador. 

In her broad stretch of coastal plain Texas is like 
other Gulf states. As the plains lead away into the 
interior they often are interspersed with belts rich in 
timber. And then the plains rise to vast plateaus, 



COTTON, RICE. AND CANE 1 87 

lofty and arid, bringing the state into relation with 
the high plains of Kansas and the north. Still 
farther west Texas embraces an area three-fourths as 
large as New York, belonging to the southeastern 
Cordilleras, and culminating in mountains from 
ten thousand to thirteen thousand feet in height. 
Texas is therefore a southern and western state, 
ranging from sandy shore to lofty mountains, with 
almost every sort of soil, climate, and surface relief. 

This vast land illustrates in its own way the prog- 
ress of empire in America; colonized as a Mexican 
province by Austin with' his emigrants from the 
north ; won to national independence by Houston 
and his handful of frontiersmen, routing the Mexi- 
can army and capturing Santa Anna in a sharp 
battle lasting eighteen minutes ; and coming nine 
years later, in 1845, freely into the American Union. 
This is within the remembrance of many who yet 
live, and marks the movement of our story into a 
region whose history lies in the future, and in whose 
bounds man is as yet far from his ultimate adjust- 
ment to nature. 

The tilling of the soil made Southern history what 
it was down to the Civil War, and the growth of 
crops is a matter of soil and climate ; it belongs, in 
other words, to geography. But here also we must 
be careful not to charge too much to environment. 
The soils of the South do not shut one up to tobacco, 
cotton, sugar, and rice ; and it was the conjunction of 
these with the holding of slaves that built up the 
social system that ruled so long under Southern skies. 
It was tobacco, which, in the plantations on the Rap- 



88 



GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 



pahannock and the James, first showed that Africans 
could be imported with profit ; and then followed the 
cotton, rice, and cane, in those long belts of semi- 
tropical lowland which came one after another 
under the dominion of the colonists. And the better 
and worse phases of slavery seem also to have fol- 
lowed from geographic diversity ; for in the planta- 




Fig. 37. Residences on the River Front, Charleston. 

tions of Virginia the master lived on the plantation 
where the slaves wrought, but among the rice and 
often among the cotton fields of the black belt of 
South Carolina and the Gulf the master was a non- 
resident, the toil was severer, and irresponsible over- 
seers were too often left to their own will. 

In 1760 North Carolina had two hundred thousand 
people, of whom one-fourth were slaves. In South 
Carolina conditions of freedom and servitude were re- 



COTTON, RICE, AND CANE 189 

versed, — of one hundred and fifty thousand inhabit- 
ants, three-fourths were slaves. The soil of the more 
southern state was favorable to slave labor. 

A chief outcome of this system of things was the 
great plantation and the great plantation owner. In 
the cotton belt there could be few small holdings of 
land, for only the large proprietor could keep a retinue 
of slaves and grow cotton on a profitable scale. The 
planter was much like the feudal lord of older days 
across the seas ; he was lord of hundreds or thou- 
sands of acres and of the human population dwelling 
on them. He commanded their service, and he gave 
them protection, but whether the relation was kindly 
or otherwise, it was still master and slave. And inci- 
dental to this plantation system there had to be an- 
other class, — the poor white. He could not acquire 
land, unless it were a plot of the poorer soil, or back 
in the mountains ; and he could not rise in trade or 
in mechanical industry, for trade was looked down 
upon, and manufacture was either primitive and sim- 
ple, and done on the plantation, or it was elaborate 
and skilled, and its product brought from England or 
New England, in return for consignments of cotton. 

The Southern gentleman, generous, hospitable, 
given to public affairs, often imperious and passion- 
ate, brought the Old World pattern of society down to 
the .last generation in America. Yet it would not be 
true to say that the cavalier shaped the entire South. 
No Southern state is more typical than South Caro- 
lina, and the early settlers of South Carolina were in 
large measure Puritan, and " the economic circum- 
stance which chiefly determined the complexion in 



190 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

South Carolina was the cultivation of rice and in- 
digo." 1 The same writer asserts that a single slave 
could in a year produce more value in rice or indigo 
than it took to buy him. Remembering human na- 
ture, and taking account of the times, the propulsion 
toward slavery was strong. But taking the South as 
a whole, we must see that the ancestry of its colo- 
nists, the adaptation of its soil, and what we may call 
the accidental beginnings of slavery, united in ways 
that defy analysis to produce the old South. 

The Southern system promoted the mastery and 
strength of the few, and produced some towering 
figures in the early and middle decades of the last 
century. The family was safeguarded and made per- 
manent, as the sons of the fathers lived on the old 
plantations and accumulated the ancestral advantages 
of education, wealth, and social refinement. " In the 
placid air of their enlightened medievalism lingered 
the brave ideals of courage and beauty and gracious 
dignity . . . and there arose an assertive, sensitive, 
sincere, dauntless race of men, esteeming life less 
than honor, and loyalty more than gold, who wrought 
with a sad, Titanic sincerity for their doomed cause." 2 
This triangular social system could not develop the 
riches of the South, for no measure of culture or per- 
sonal power for the few could atone for the lack of a 
sinewy, forehanded, and intelligent middle class, and 
a great army of free, well-paid toilers in field, factory, 
and mine, whose children might aspire to better things 
than their fathers could achieve. 

1 Fiske, " Old Virginia and her Neighbors," II, 325. 

2 Edwin A. Alderman, Educational Review, II, 30. 



COTTON, RICE, AND CANE 



191 



The prevalence and independence of the great 
plantation, and the absence of an industrial class, 
caused in the old South a dearth of towns and town 
life. The men of wealth lived in the country, and 
for the poor the town had nothing to offer. No gen- 
eral statements can do justice to this condition of the 




Fig. 38. Cotton Levee, New Orleans. 



South, and we shall have to deal a little in figures. 
Remembering that the towns have had their great 
growth since 1865, we will take the nine seaboard 
states from Virginia to Texas. 

There is but one city that compares in size with 
Cleveland, Buffalo, Pittsburg, or Milwaukee; and New 
Orleans, with her present population of 287,000, has 



192 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

gathered more than one-third of her people since 
1870. With this exception there is no town of 100,- 
000 people in the nine states, Richmond and Atlanta 
coming nearest, with 85,000 and 90,000. In 1870 At- 
lanta had but 22,000, and before the opening of the 
war she had less than 10,000 people. In this entire 
chain of states there are 49 towns of more than 10,000 
inhabitants, while Massachusetts has 47 such towns. 
If we seek the totals in both cases of people residing 
in such communities, the figures stand at 1,525,564 
for the nine Southern states, and 2,050,862 for Massa- 
chusetts. If we now compare the paltry 8,000 square 
miles of the New England commonwealth with the 
637,000 miles of the nine, the result is little less than 
astounding. There was vast elbow-room in the early 
South, and there is still in the new, and a hundred 
millions of people could live within the valleys and 
on the wide plains of the old Confederacy. 

As the holdings and the tillage of the land were at 
the heart of the Southern social system, so the first 
and greatest revolution came in this field at the close 
of the Civil War. The freeing of the slaves greatly 
reduced the property of all the plantation owners, 
and through debts and enforced neglect of their 
properties for four years, they afterward lost what 
emancipation might otherwise have left them. They 
thus could neither own, nor, in the absence of service, 
till if they did own, great estates, and the lands were 
in large measure sold and broken up into small 
holdings, and the building of a new life upon an in- 
dustrial as well as an agricultural foundation was 
begun, The mill- and the forge and coarse loom of 



COTTON, RICE, AND CANE 193 

the plantation must now give way to the factory 
and the furnace, and such towns must grow as meet 
the traveler's eye in Connecticut or Pennsylvania. 
Hence such cities as Atlanta, Columbia, Chatta- 
nooga, Knoxville, and Birmingham have sprung into 
strength, feeling the thrill of new life that followed 
upon the trying years of first adjustment to the new 
conditions. 

The isolation of the old South has departed with 
the alien institution of slavery, and with it is passing 
the conservative spirit that held the states of the 
Gulf from onward movements of thought. Fiske 
does not hesitate to say that more Puritanism lingers 
in the South to-day than is left in New England, but 
the young South is modern and will be so, as she de- 
velops the school, the mill, the farm, and the mine 
with equal hand. Geographical causes have wrought 
with power during the last generation to bring the 
North and the South to common ways of thinking 
and doing, and perhaps no fair and intelligent person 
on either side of Mason and Dixon's Line would fail 
to agree with a son of the South, the Honorable 
Hoke Smith, Secretary of the Interior in Cleveland's 
second administration, when he says, " Had it not 
been for the institution of slavery, checking white 
immigration and hindering development, the South, 
with natural resources in its favor in i860, would 
have been the greatest manufacturing and mining, as 
well as agricultural, section of the Union." 

Nothing speaks more clearly of the new South 
than the growth of cotton manufacture. As cotton 
was first in the ancient system, so it may become in 



194 



GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 



the years of the future. The mill owners of New 
England do not fear what may be done in Man- 
chester, or anywhere else across the Atlantic, but 
they must take steady account of what is doing in 
the Carolinas, Georgia, and Alabama. Before the 
nineteenth century closed, Massachusetts had sent a 
commission to inquire into the cotton mills of South 




Fig. 39. Cotton Wharf from the Battery, Charleston. 



Carolina. The president of a Southern cotton mill 
rings out no uncertain call to build up the business 
of the home land : " Every bale of cotton produced 
in Georgia should be spun in Georgia. There is no 
such thing as too many mills in the South so long as 
a single bale of cotton is shipped to New England 
or across the water." Then he tells the Southern 
farmer of his losses, when he sells cotton at $25 per 
bale, and later brings it back in fabrics or garments 



COTTON, RICE, AND CANE 195 

for three times the price, enriching the rich or feed- 
ing the distant poor, at the expense of those at home. 

All that is lacking at the South is the skilled super- 
intendents and operatives, and these are already avail- 
able in large degree. The streams of the southern 
Appalachians will furnish perennial water-power, if 
indeed, as now seems likely, their forests are rescued 
and preserved. If water be lacking, coal is plentiful, 
and in many parts is near at hand. Labor will be 
abundant, when the colored population have had 
another decade of industrial training. In one of the 
new mill towns of the South, visited by a Northern 
writer, coal was bought at $1.50 per ton, while com- 
petitors in Massachusetts were paying three times 
that price and more. The saving in freights was $2 
per bale ; and while these figures are not the average, 
they point to enormous savings and untold economic 
gains for the Southern states, by following the 
simplest laws of geography, and using their superb 
facilities for working up the raw materials of the 
field, forest, and mine. 

Cotton did not begin to take its place in Southern 
industry until 1880. In 1881 the exposition at 
Atlanta set the ball rolling. On one of the mornings 
of that summer, cotton was picked from the plant in 
sight of the fair grounds, spun, woven, and made into 
a suit, which appeared later in the day on the 
person of the governor of Georgia. Single establish- 
ments in Massachusetts now pay more in wages than 
did all the cotton mills of the South combined in 
1880. But in 1900 there were more establishments 
in the South than in New England, 400 to 332. 



196 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

This does not mean that the South is now first, for 
the concerns are smaller, but she grew from 610,000 
spindles in 1880 to 4,298,000 in 1900. In the latter 
year her capital was $124,000,000, as against New 
England's $272,000,000; but her percentage of in- 
crease in the previous ten years was 131, and that of 
the older home of the industry was 12. The south- 
ern cotton crop of the early eighties was about 
doubled in the last years of the nineties. 

But cotton is not king, though it may long be among 
the great single interests in the South. There is no 
larger factor in the present unfolding of the South than 
the diversification of her crops. The wasteful days, 
when cotton and tobacco wore out the soils, and these 
were abandoned for fresh fields, are over, and rotation 
and variety have come in to save the soils, fill up the 
wastes, give rich and poor a place, and develop the 
riches of the land to their utmost. There is as much 
variety of soil and air as in the North, and almost 
everything that can be raised north of the Ohio can 
be raised south of it, with a wealth of characteristic 
fibers, grains, fruits, and timbers thrown in. w Loca- 
tions can be found in which wheat, corn, cotton, and 
fruit can be raised in the same field." 1 

It is the day of grain elevators in Galveston, wheat 
conventions in Georgia, and roller mills in South 
Carolina. 

Thus the newer products are putting some of the 
older interests far in the rear, as sugar, which in 
Louisiana holds its place, and may always remain a 
landmark of the past, even while the product of the 

1 Hoke Smith, North American Review, 1894, Vol. CLIX, p. 134. 



COTTON, RICE, AND CANE 1 97 

beet with strides is overtaking it. But another an- 
cient crop still grows, in rice fields of increasing size, 
cutting in half the importations of the grain, and roll- 
ing up to vast values in Louisiana and Texas. Here, 
too, the South has felt the enlivening touch of modern 
industry and practical science, for she has learned the 
uses of irrigation and has largely made her gains 
through the importation of a new variety of rice from 
Japan, under the care of the Department of Agricul- 
ture. It would be rash to say that the South will 
not grow her own and her neighbor's tea, and she is 
releasing herself from the grip of the herders and 
packers of the plains and prairies. 

What more does the South need to warrant the 
largest prophecy for her future? If it is lumber, she 
has perhaps the largest reserves yet available in the 
United States. If it is iron, she has it in veins of un- 
limited extent. If it is coal, she can supply it through 
the long future from every Appalachian state. If it 
is fertilizer, she has the phosphates of Florida and 
South Carolina ; and she has building stones, clays, 
asphalt, petroleum, salt, and gold. Her Appalachian 
uplands, with water-power, timber, iron, and coal are 
sandwiched between her lowlands with cotton, rice, 
corn, and fruit. And she is fringed by the sea, 
whose warm, moist breath gives her blossom and 
fruit without stint, and anchors in quiet waters at 
Charleston, at Key West, at Mobile and New Orleans 
and Galveston the growing fleets of her commerce. 
Already it has been projected to build for a hundred 
miles or more, across the coral islets and their shal- 
low straits, a railway from the mainland to Key West, 



198 



GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 



where, with the new prosperity of the Antilles and 
the new isthmian canal and the new South at the 
gateway of the Gulf of Mexico, one of the greatest 
American cities may in a few generations rise. The 
southern man cares little for the issues of the past, 
for the golden chances of to-day and the beckonings 
of a future too big for his imagining are before him. 




Fig. 40. Mississippi Steamer at Levee, Mobile. 

It is easy and safe to predict an era not far away 
when the Appalachians and their Piedmont fringes 
shall be as full of wheels as New England, sending 
their products as widely ; when northern Alabama 
and Birmingham shall be another western Pennsyl- 
vania and Pittsburg ; when the commerce of Galves- 
ton will compare with that of Boston, and New 
Orleans become a rival of Chicago. No region of 



COTTON, RICE, AND CANE 1 99 

the United States is like the South in variety ; she 
has the water-power and spindles of New England, 
the lumber of the far Northwest, the soils of the 
prairies, the coal of Pennsylvania, the iron of Minne- 
sota. In every one of these she is a first, or a good 
second, and in the total outrivals all. Her incubus is 
gone, the carpetbagger is gone or has left his sons 
to honest citizenship, and the negro is her greatest 
problem ; but this will be solved by industry and the 
training of the hand, with growing intelligence and 
the building of self-respecting character. Not many 
years will pass before sectionalism, already dissolving, 
will be lost in the industrial, agricultural, and com- 
mercial unity of what for convenience we shall always 
call one of the great " sections " of our country. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE CIVIL WAR 

After the Civil War had closed, a citizen of the 
South said to Horatio Seymour : " The North would 
never have beaten us if it had not been for our rivers. 
They ran from the north into the heart of our coun- 
try, and we could not get away from you." This 
must not be taken to mean too much ; but it raises 
many questions and may set us upon thought. The 
Mississippi does flow from north to south, and joins 
the prairies and plains to the lowlands of the Gulf. 
Hence, that man of the Northwest was right who 
prophesied that the Mississippi Valley must belong 
to one nation. But the invading armies went down 
rather than up, because in no other way could the 
North force the South to stay in the Union. So far 
as natural highways are concerned, Tennessee could 
overrun Illinois as easily as Illinois could hurry her 
battalions into Tennessee. 

There is no boundary of much military significance 
between the North and the South, and indeed the 
great physiographic belts cross the line and lie partly 
in one section and partly in the other. New Jersey 
and Maryland are in no important ways different 
from Virginia and South Carolina, for all belong to 
the Atlantic coastal plain. The valleys and moun- 



THE CIVIL WAR 201 

tains of the Appalachians are found in Pennsylvania, 
and they are found in Tennessee. And the lowlands 
of the Mississippi continue from the Lakes to the Gulf 
of Mexico, while farther west the uplands of Missouri 
and Kansas are separated by no barrier from those of 
Arkansas and Texas. East of the Rocky Mountains 
the natural land units were divided between the op- 
posing groups of states. 

We may indeed trace a line of rivers and count it 
for what it is worth as a boundary. The Potomac 
made such a limit with Maryland and the District of 
Columbia on the one side and Virginia on the other, 
but the Potomac did not keep Lee from Gettysburg 
or Grant from Richmond. Maryland was in senti- 
ment almost as much a Confederate as it was a Union 
state, and West Virginia was sliced off and joined the 
North. By. any nice theory of river barriers, the 
Ohio should have marked the line ; but Kentucky on 
her south bank clung to the Union as a common- 
wealth, while thousands of her men entered the 
southern army. On the other hand, many in south- 
ern Illinois and Indiana were in close sympathy with 
the Confederacy. Similar things might be written 
about the Missouri River and the halves of the great 
state which are made by it. These streams had no 
large importance for the war, therefore, because they 
ran through states checkered with opposing ideas, 
and because the Northerner in accomplishing his aim 
had to go where the Southerner was, and fight his 
battles there. 

But there were rivers of the utmost importance in 
the strife on both sides of the Appalachians. In 



202 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

Virginia the Potomac, the Rappahannock, the York, 
the James, and the Appomattox all flow southeast- 
ward through the lowlands to their mouths in sea or 
river. Washington is on the Potomac, Richmond is 
on the James, and every movement of the armies 
of Virginia between the hostile capitals had to take 
account of these streams of the coastal plain. And 
to the west was the Shenandoah River and its valley, 
a road which neither the Confederate nor the Union 
commander was ever at liberty to forget. 

No less a critical factor in the long struggle was 
the Mississippi River from Cairo to the Gulf. In the 
War of 1812 Andrew Jackson had made his name 
and paved his way to the presidency by crushing 
a British army with his hardy Westerners at New 
Orleans. But from 1861 to the summer of 1863 the 
great river was to yield its points of advantage to this 
side and to that, after fierce land attacks, bitter naval 
encounters, and prolonged sieges. If we leave out 
the Atlantic coastal plain, the rest of the Confederacy 
was about cut in halves by the Mississippi. Its pos- 
session was, therefore, of the utmost importance to 
both sides. To the Confederates it was necessary, 
because to hold it was to have free communication 
for their armies and for supplies between the east 
and the three great states that lay west of the river. 
It was correspondingly the object of the Federals to 
cut this line, and thus isolate from each other the two 
groups of the Southern states. 

The situation was much like that of the thirteen 
colonies in relation to the Hudson in the Revolution. 
In both cases we have a chain of states crossed by a 



204 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

navigable river, and the important points on one, 
New York and Albany, may well be compared to 
New Orleans and Vicksburg or Memphis. And if 
Grant had failed in his attempt in 1863 as Howe and 
Burgoyne failed in theirs in 1777, the South might 
have maintained its independence, at least for a time, 
as the colonies had done. 

A little to the east, in Kentucky and Tennessee, 
are two other rivers which figure constantly in the 
first years of the Civil War, and often in close rela- 
tion to the Mississippi. One of these is the Tennes- 
see, born in the mountains of North Carolina and 
Tennessee, pursuing its way down the Appalachian 
Valley, turning aside at Chattanooga to cut through 
the plateau and cross northern Alabama, where it 
changes its course and flows almost directly north 
across Tennessee and Kentucky to the Ohio. An- 
other stream, the Cumberland, rising in the plateau 
of eastern Kentucky, makes a bend much like that of 
its southern neighbor, southward by Nashville, and 
then, turning north, runs closely parallel to the Ten- 
nessee, and enters the Ohio but a few miles above it. 

The Tennessee was to see stirring times at Chatta- 
nooga and Knoxville. Both rivers could be navigated 
by gunboats a long way above the Ohio, and both 
were to be guarded and stubbornly fought for in the 
early days of the conflict. 

If there had been no Appalachians, the northern 
people would have had a very different problem to 
study and solve. But for these, cotton and tobacco 
would have been spread where now are bold moun- 
tains, forested slopes, and a temperate climate. Cot- 



THE CIVIL WAR 



205 



ton and tobacco would have brought slavery and the 
plantation with them, and the South would have been 
" solid " in a sense that has never belonged to that 
word. Instead of scores of thousands of Federal 
soldiers from the uplands and forests, there would 
have been a vast increase of the Confederate armies, 
and what might have been the issue of such a contest 
we can never know. Virginia was divided against 
itself, and the mountains went to the Union, and the 
plains joined hands with the South. Even in Ten- 
nessee were many Union citizens, and it was at one 
time a prime object of the administration at Washing- 
ton to bring an army into eastern Tennessee, to co- 
operate with the great body of sympathizers with the 
North that was to be found in the mountain valleys 
and on the Cumberland plateau. 

If there could have been any doubt before, the 
great conflict seems to have proved that our land, 
from east to west, is cut out for one people. The 
Appalachians were a great barrier in colonial days, 
but we cannot think of them as a national boundary, 
now that the forests are so largely cut away and the 
highways of traffic run everywhere. If this were not 
enough, there are open gateways betokening unity 
along the St. Lawrence and the Mohawk, and the 
wide Gulf plains wrap completely around the south- 
ern end of the mountains, joining the plains of the 
Atlantic with the prairies of the Mississippi. The 
Rocky Mountains alone, within our domain, might 
conceivably divide nations, and now, almost forty 
years after 1865, we can look with a bird's eye upon 
the physical features of the United States and say 



206 



GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 



that final union was inevitable. The only other pos- 
sible thing would be a group of changing and quar- 
reling powers, for two compact, stable republics could 
not arbitrarily cross all lines of geographic control 
and live side by side in peace. 




Fig. 42. Vicksburg horn the West. Photograph by A. L. Blanks, 
Vicksburg. 



Professor Shaler, in his history of his native com- 
monwealth, Kentucky, has described what he well 
calls the " geological distribution of politics " in that 
state. The Blue Grass region, rich in its limestone 
soils, was hospitable to large holdings of land, the 
slave system was dominant, and here were the strong 
southern majorities. The poorer sandstone soils, on 
the other hand, especially in the large and wilder 
tracts of eastern Kentucky, supported a poorer popu- 



THE CIVIL WAR 207 

lation which was commonly hostile to slavery, and 
furnished many hard fighters for the Union armies. 

Thus the rivers, the soils, and the reliefs of the 
land are all to be counted in if we would appreciate 
the causes that led to the war, or would understand 
its campaigns and its battles. Before we study some 
of the more special problems we must recall one very 
general condition that had a profound bearing on the 
fortunes of the South, namely, their almost exclusive 
agriculture. They did not have the mills and the 
shops to make what they needed for peace or for 
war; and when "northern gunboats at last made the 
blockade of southern ports effective, the pressure on 
the South was severe, for she could neither send out 
the cotton which would give her money to buy, nor 
could she count on bringing in, after she had bought 
them, the munitions of war or the necessaries of life. 

Not trying to follow, in this short sketch, the strict 
lines of division into military departments, we can 
see in a general way how the centers or lines of 
action located themselves. For the South to hold 
independence, or for the North to enforce union, 
there must be a struggle between the Appalachians 
and the sea ; and because the two capitals lay, one 
in Virginia and the other on its edge, barely more 
than one hundred miles apart, the first and last great 
operations of the war were between the Potomac and 
the Appomattox. And because the South had an 
extended shore-line and many harbors, and foreign 
commerce was vital to her success, swiftly impro- 
vised navies on both sides made the ocean border the 
theater of some of the hottest and bloodiest fighting 



208 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

of the war. West of the Appalachians lay the Mis- 
sissippi Valley and a river whose final holding was 
vital to success on either side. Here lines many hun- 
dred miles long had to be maintained ; here rivers 
were fortified, railways were few but important ; here 
the great generals of the war were taught, and here 
some of the most brilliant battles of the war were 
fought. It was not until this great campaign ground 
was in full possession of northern arms that there 
could be sufficient concentration in Virginia to bring 
hostilities to a close. 

The first line of outposts established by the south- 
ern forces lay in Tennessee and Kentucky, well 
down toward the Ohio River. If this could be held, 
there could be no effective or lasting invasion of the 
lower Mississippi country — unless it came from the 
sea. And such a line would serve as a base from 
which to win the Ohio and harass or overrun the 
states lying to the north'. The main artery to be 
held was the Mississippi River itself. 

Cairo, at the junction of the Ohio with the Missis- 
sippi, was held by the newly commissioned General 
Grant. About a dozen miles down the river, upon 
a high bluff on the Kentucky side, was Columbus, 
which the Confederates had strongly fortified, plant- 
ing there 120 guns. This was the Confederate left, 
and is a good sample of those fortified points mainly 
on the east side of the Mississippi, well suited by 
nature for military defense, because the river offered 
a natural moat on the west, and the batteries could 
hurl a plunging fire upon vessels going up or down. 

Sixty miles or a little more to the east, the Ten- 



THE CIVIL WAR 209 

nessee and Cumberland rivers in parallel courses flow 
north across the southern boundary of Kentucky. 
Just south of the line, in Tennessee, Fort Henry had 
been erected on the east bank of the Tennessee, and 
Fort Donelson on the west bank of the Cumberland. 
These two points of defense were scarcely a dozen 
miles apart, and so long as they were held, Tennessee 
could not be invaded from the north along the val- 
leys. This was especially important, because Nash- 
ville lay on the banks of the Cumberland, and it was 
appropriate, therefore, that Donelson should be the 
stronger of the two forts. 

About eighty miles northeastward from Fort Donel- 
son was Bowling Green, at the point where the rail- 
way from Louisville forked toward Nashville and 
Memphis. Here was the Confederate right, and the 
line, like a crescent, swung down into Tennessee, 
across the twin rivers, and back into Kentucky, to 
Columbus, on the Mississippi. It was the object of 
the South to hold this line, and any proposals to push 
it toward the Ohio or invade the North were dismissed. 
But the North had no alternative but to try to break 
the line. A step in this direction had been taken 
when Grant sent a force up the Ohio and occupied 
Paducah, at the mouth of the Tennessee. 

It was possible to make a direct effort to open the 
Mississippi, and this at first was planned, but this in- 
volved great difficulties. Columbus was likened to 
Gibraltar : ships alone could not destroy this secure 
perch on lofty bluffs. A land force could not take 
it, so long as connection along the river was open. 
To have attempted the post would have involved a 
p 



2IO GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

siege, and might have anticipated much that happened 
about Vicksburg more than a year later. 

General Halleck decided upon a different plan, 
which was carried out by Grant and Admiral Foote. 
The center of the line was to be broken by a land 
and water attack upon Fort Henry and Fort Donel- 
son. If these could be carried, the two rivers would 
be open, Nashville would be exposed, and the whole 
southern line would be pushed southward. And so 
it turned out : Fort Henry was taken, and as soon 
as Fort Donelson was invested, Bowling Green was 
abandoned ; and as soon as it fell, Nashville was given 
up also; and on the west, Polk withdrew his stores 
and forces to Island No. 10 and New Madrid, thirty 
miles or more down the river. The stream there 
makes a great double bend, and the town, although 
ten miles northwest of the island, is still down stream 
from it. But the possession of the Tennessee and 
Cumberland rendered this position and outpost too 
exposed to be long held, and the next withdrawal was 
to Fort Pillow, fifty miles down the river in Tennessee. 
It was much like Columbus, being on a high bluff east 
of the river ; but the flanking movement on the east 
had carried the Federal forces still farther south, and 
the great battle of Shiloh was fought, inflicting vast 
losses upon both sides, but leaving the Federals in 
possession of the Memphis and Charleston Railroad, 
and jeopardizing such positions as Fort Pillow and 
Memphis on the Mississippi. The issue of the naval 
combats at both these points was favorable to the 
North, and the positions were yielded without siege 
or land operations of any kind. 



THE CIVIL WAR 211 

Our object must not be lost from view, which is not 
the story of marches, attacks, or capitulations, but to 
see how the large lines of movement were made 
ready by nature, and seized upon by men versed in 
military strategy. It was seen by Halleck that fugi- 
tive operations west of the Mississippi could have no 
great relations, although they had been important to 
the North, since, in the first months of strife, Missouri 
had been restrained from going out of the Union. 
But now the river and the states to the east must be 
held by the side that would win. Everything west 
of the Appalachians belonged to the combatant who 
could hold the Mississippi, the Tennessee, and the 
Cumberland. If the North could do this, it would 
cut off Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas from the 
Eastern states of the Confederacy, and center the 
conflict on the Potomac and the James. Halleck saw 
this without question, though it required his greater 
subordinate officer and two years of tenacious strug- 
gle to bring it to pass. 

The campaigns around Vicksburg illustrate both 
the local and the general problems of the Mississippi 
in those days of war. Most of the river above that 
point had been opened by Federal gunboats, while 
Farragut from below had taken New Orleans and 
Baton Rouge, leaving only Vicksburg and closely as- 
sociated fortresses in the hands of the Confederates. 
Farragut had run under the Vicksburg guns, and said 
it could be done again ; but this would not do for reg- 
ular transmission of men and supplies. So long as 
this single point could be maintained, therefore, the 
South could keep her enemy from using the river, and 



212 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

the enemy could not keep her from such communica- 
tion as she might wish between the Eastern and West- 
ern Gulf states. So strong was the position that the 
repeated efforts of such commanders as Sherman and 
Grant were foiled, and one plan after another was 
given up. 

Vicksburg is one of those river towns which have 
been determined by a bluff, at the base of which flows 
the stream. Upon any good map of the region there 
is evidence enough that the river does not always 
keep the same track ; but here for the present is the 
bend, and on the slopes to the east is the town, 
stretching up to the low plateau above. It is a rule 
of meandering streams also to cut a deeper channel 
on the outer curve of the bend, and thus we can see 
two reasons for the growth of a town, for there was a 
commanding site high and dry above the swamps and 
bayous on the west, and there was approach for the 
largest vessels to the wharves at the base of the 
bluffs. 

Both above and below Vicksburg there is a con- 
siderable tract of the low bottom land lying between 
the Mississippi and the base of the bluff. North of 
Vicksburg, the Yazoo River follows the foot of the 
escarpment, and then, through a maze of lakes and 
swamps, bears to the west and enters the Mississippi. 
Vicksburg is on the steep slope that separates 
the bottoms from the upland. West of the city a 
great meander doubles the river on itself, as it flows 
first to the northeast, and then abruptly southwest, 
under the city. Above is the Yazoo, sending its 
several mouths into the Mississippi as the greater 



214 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

river sends her distributaries into the Gulf. One of 
these is Chickasaw Bayou, under the Walnut Hills. 
From the river opposite Vicksburg runs the railway 
to Shreveport, and north and south of this road is a 
tortuous network of bayous and swamps. 

A fleet could not capture the town, perched upon 
its heights. And when Grant at last was free to 
make the trial, he proposed to come at his goal by a 
combined attack, sending Sherman down the river to 
the mouth of the Yazoo, and coming himself from the 
northeast. The cowardly surrender of Holly Springs 
by an unworthy subordinate, and the loss of vast sup- 
plies stored there, compelled Grant to abandon his 
plan until a new base could be established. But 
meantime Sherman had gone down the river, only to 
find himself among the marshes of the lower Yazoo, 
exposed to the sharpshooters and batteries of the 
towering wall on the east, and without the support 
that was planned. He failed completely and with- 
drew, to share the fortunes of Grant when later it was 
decided to make the river the great line of approach 
from the north. 

Grant's problem was to get a foothold on the 
plateau back of Vicksburg and at the same time 
keep an open line of communication from the north. 
His attempt to come directly to his goal had failed, 
and he will now try it from the lowlands and the 
river, moving down in conjunction with Porter's fleet. 
He does not attempt the bluffs north of Vicksburg and 
east of the Yazoo, for the obstacles were too great 
and Sherman's failure there had made them known. 
He does try to complete what had the year before 



2l6 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

been begun, — to turn the Mississippi across the nar- 
row tongue of land within the bend, at a point four 
miles below the city. If this could have been done, 
there would have been no need to capture Vicksburg; 
for, isolated from the river, it would have been no 
more important than any similar town. But Grant 
failed in this, and again nature gave her favor to the 
Confederates. Indeed, such was their confidence in 
the difficulties of the ground, that the lowlands were 
practically unoccupied, the batteries commanding the 
river being thought sufficient. Unsuccessful efforts 
also were made to find or cut navigable channels 
among the bayous on the west, between Milliken's 
bend on the north and New Carthage on the south. 

What Grant did was to take his army swiftly across 
the watery lowlands, — while Porter ran his boats 
under Vicksburg loaded with supplies, — cross the 
Mississippi thirty miles below the city, cut loose from 
his supplies, seize Jackson and the region east and 
south of Vicksburg, fight several battles upon the 
provisions carried in knapsacks, keep reinforcements 
from coming to Pemberton, drive him into Vicksburg, 
and open communication with the Mississippi north 
of the city. The difficulties interposed by physio- 
graphic conditions were so great that a much larger 
army must have been required by a commander of 
less judgment, promptness, and daring. 

The underground formation in and about the town 
to which siege was now laid was such as to give dis- 
tinct shape to the events of the hour. The great 
mass in which the Mississippi has carved the high 
bluffs consists largely of tough clay, so coherent that 



THE CIVIL WAR 



217 



vertical walls of it will stand for many years. Thus 
we can see how easy it was, when the bursting of 
shells went on week after week, until scarcely a 
dwelling was unscathed, to burrow in the earth, and 
live, as thousands did, in subterranean rooms. The 
same conditions made it easy to open tunnels, in which 
mines could be sprung. The plateau also is furrowed 
by short ravines which have been made by the streams 
that drain the heights toward the river. They could 
only be short ; for a dozen miles east of the city the 
Big Black River runs parallel with the Yazoo and 
Mississippi toward its union with the latter stream. 
These ravines alternate with narrow table-topped 
spurs, which could be easily fortified so as to com- 
mand every point in the ravines with cross-fire. 
Hence it was that the siege line could not be drawn 
too closely around the beleaguered city, but had a 
length of eight miles from bluff to bluff on the north 
and south. 

It should not be thought that Vicksburg ended the 
war in the southwest, while the Federal army had 
still a daring and persistent foe in the fertile region 
west of the Mississippi. The bayou country was still 
to embarrass the invader with conditions of war that 
could not be found in the north. Early in 1864, fol- 
lowing the capitulation of Vicksburg, an expedition 
was planned for the west, which resulted in entire fail- 
ure. A force was to go up the Red River, take Shreve- 
port near the Texas border, disperse the Confederate 
forces in those places, and make accessible the cotton 
and other supplies of Texas. There was to be a fleet 
on the river, but land communications must also be 



2l8 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

kept up, for the river is subject to changes that would 
hinder the passage of boats. Indeed, a map of the 
river belt shows a kind of geography that is rarely 
seen — many tributaries swollen into lakes, making the 
whole river above Alexandria look like a ragged clus- 
ter of grapes. A sluggish stream grafted upon the 
Mississippi, setting back with the silting of the bot- 
tom of the trunk river, builds up its own bed in turn, 
and thus ponds the water in its own branches, form- 
ing the lakes already mentioned. 

Thus the country was difficult, the expedition was 
blunderingly handled, the Confederates moved rapidly 
and fought fiercely, thousands of men and many guns 
were lost, and the Federals were fortunate in bringing 
off a remnant of their invading force. The national 
campaign had, in the words of Draper, " but one re- 
deeming feature — the engineering operations of Col- 
onel Bailey." Porter's fleet was caught at Alexandria 
by the falling of the waters, making its abandonment 
and destruction probable. The Yankee engineer, in 
the face of much ridicule, built a dam at the falls, 
deepening the water and allowing the vessels to pass. 
The retreat was thus at last successful, but the ex- 
pedition was a defeat, and a disgrace as well, to the 
Federal arms. 

If there is a point in the South which for the uses 
of strategy compares with the lower Mississippi, that 
point is the southern gateway of the Appalachian 
Valley, the country around Chattanooga. This region 
is .sharply defined in all its geographic features. 
On the east are the wild forest slopes of the Unakas ; 
on the west is the frowning Cumberland escarpment 



220 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

and the Cumberland plateau. Down this great valley 
to the southwest runs the Tennessee River, already 
majestic with the tribute gathered from the mountains 
and valleys of Virginia and North Carolina. But in- 
stead of passing out at the wide-open southern door, 
it suddenly swings off to the right, and follows a deep 
gorge through the plateau into Alabama. 

Just where the river leaves the spacious Appalachian 
Valley and enters the plateau is Chattanooga, on the 
east bank. Northward the railway runs, eighty miles, 
to Knoxville, on the river also, and then on into Vir- 
ginia to Richmond and Norfolk, or down the Shen- 
andoah to Harpers Ferry. Westward, through the 
gorge, is a railway which branches in the northeastern 
corner of Alabama, and leads to Memphis and Nash- 
ville. Southeastward, another line connected with 
Atlanta and Savannah. Chattanooga, therefore, by 
nature, and by man's use of nature, is a key to all 
military movements in the southern Appalachians, 
especially as it controlled at that time the only direct 
line of communication between the southwest and the 
Confederate capital. 

A little below Chattanooga a small stream, called 
Lookout Creek, enters the Tennessee from the south- 
west. It flows in a narrow valley which it has cut in 
the Cumberland tableland. East of it runs a long, flat- 
topped hill, about fifteen hundred feet above the valley. 
It is like a wedge, narrowing at the north and ending at 
the bank of the Tennessee where the river turns west 
at this point, forming Moccasin Bend. This hill is a 
spur of the plateau, and is the historic Lookout Moun- 
tain. Standing upon its northern end, one may look 



THE CIVIL WAR 221 

northward upon Chattanooga and the river, eastward 
over the wide lowland, and westward across the gorge 
of Lookout Creek upon the parent plateau, from 
which the observer's perch has been separated. 

Between Chattanooga and the river is Cameron 
Hill, nearly two hundred feet in height. We may 
stand on this, as upon the stage of an amphitheater, 
and see all the features that controlled the lines of 
battle. Lookout Mountain, with its steep slope, 
crowned by a sandstone cliff, is south, on the right. 
The river is at the left and in the rear. The city is 
directly in front, and three miles to the east runs a hill 
extending from north to south for several miles, and 
three hundred feet high. This is Missionary Ridge ; it 
is a small example of the innumerable worn mountain 
ridges that run up and down the Appalachian Valley 
from Alabama to Pennsylvania. It is the upturned 
edge of a mass of the Knox dolomite, the common 
rock on the floor of the great valley in this region. 
It has not only been turned partially on edge, but 
has been pushed, in ancient days, from the eastward 
somewhat over the rocks that form the base of the 
ridge. The geologist would say that the structure 
shows a fold and a thrust fault. 

Now we have the conditions of battle, but we must 
go a few miles south from Chattanooga to follow the 
line of events. In September, 1863, a little more than 
two months after the capture of Vicksburg, the Fed- 
eral army entered Chattanooga, under Rosecrans. 
The Confederates under Bragg were believed to be in 
retreat southward, but were in reality preparing for 
aggression. Rosecrans moved out and was met at 



222 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

Chickamauga, twelve miles southeast of Chattanooga. 
Here is another longitudinal stream, Chickamauga 
Creek, parallel to Lookout Creek, the Lookout Moun- 
tain Ridge, and the Chattanooga Creek; its Indian 
meaning is the River of Death. The bloody battle 
on the banks of this stream was a defeat for Rose- 
crans, and would have been a rout but for Thomas, 
the " rock of Chickamauga." The rocks of Chicka- 
mauga are not so well known, those gently slanting 
beds of limestone whose outcropping edges furnished 
a natural fortification to many riflemen in the two 
days of battle. 

Rosecrans took refuge in Chattanooga, and his foes 
well thought that he was in a trap. But he was re- 
lieved from duty, and Thomas was in command, 
until Grant, now free, could be brought, from the 
west. 

Our story of the great battle can be told in a 
moment, for our only purpose is to see how the move- 
ments of war followed the forms of the land. The 
Confederates held Lookout Mountain and Missionary 
Ridge. Grant observed the great battle from Orchard 
Knob. He deployed his army in three divisions, — 
sending Hooker to dislodge Bragg's left from Look- 
out Mountain, Sherman to push back the enemy's 
right, and Thomas to storm the Confederate center on 
Missionary Ridge. That this was perhaps the most 
spectacular battle of the war was due primarily to the 
geographic conditions, but also to the unerring skill 
and certainty with which the plan of battle was carried 
out by the three great subordinates of the command- 
ing general. 



224 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

It would require a separate chapter even to sketch 
the geographic conditions which controlled the move- 
ments of the great armies in Virginia from 1861 to 
1865. We have more than once in this volume had 
occasion to look upon this part of the Atlantic coastal 
plain, backed by the mountains and crossed by tidal 
rivers flowing to the southeast. Roads were few and 
in part because the rivers were many. The ground 
was often flat, swampy, and covered with forest, while 
the maps were too commonly poor and inadequate. 
The direct line of attack or retreat between Richmond 
and Washington lay across the rivers and these 
tangled lowlands. A dilatory, not to say timid, com- 
mander kept the Federal forces from striking a blow, 
and allowed Lee to organize the Southern army, and 
maintain an ascendency that was never shaken until 
Grant came from Chattanooga to Virginia. 

McClellan had made himself a slave of geographic 
conditions when he had organized his costly and use- 
less Peninsular campaign, by which he intended to 
come up between the York and James rivers and 
enter Richmond. But commanders who win are not 
only organizers and strategists and students of the 
map — -they are fighters, a consideration never to be 
overlooked in the study of campaigns. 

The Shenandoah Valley, lying behind the Blue 
Ridge, offers, in connection with the Virginia lowlands, 
perhaps the best illustration of our theme in all the 
South. The relations of this " Valley of Virginia " 
were briefly given in Chapter III. We there traced 
it northward beyond Harrisburg and southward to 
Chattanooga. All its northern portion in Virginia 



226 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

drains through the Shenandoah into the Potomac at 
Harpers Ferry. West of the immediate valley of the 
Shenandoah are other parallel valleys and ridges 
until we come, farther west, to the Alleghany escarp- 
ment. Snugly protected by mountains, well watered 
by many streams, rich in soils derived from ancient 
beds of limestone, filled with fertile farms and com- 
fortable homes, it afforded a scene of rural beauty and 
human prosperity, until in the four years of war it 
was found to be a great highway for armies. Running 
transverse to the rivers of the plain, and cut off from 
them by the Blue Ridge, either army could use it to 
flank the other, although it was the Confederates who 
used it most. 

At the very beginning of disunion the shops and 
arsenal at Harpers Ferry were seized, and war did not 
desert the valley for the next four years. In 1862 
Stonewall Jackson was sent beyond the Blue Ridge 
to make a diversion that might destroy the effective- 
ness of McClellan's campaign in the Peninsula, espe- 
cially by threatening Washington. Jackson enacted 
along the Shenandoah one of the most brilliant chap- 
ters in the history of the Confederate arms. 

It was expected by McClellan that he would take 
to the Peninsula one hundred and fifty thousand men, 
but in this he was disappointed. Jackson being in the 
valley, the President held back thirty-five thousand men 
under McDowell to defend Washington. Banks was 
sent from Manassas to Winchester, and McDowell was 
ordered to Manassas. Jackson thus had McDowell on 
his right, Banks in front of him in the valley, and Fre- 
mont in the mountains on his left. His object was to 



228 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

crush them one by one before they could unite. He 
drove Banks on a breathless retreat down the valley, 
until the Federal soldiers had crossed the Potomac to 
avoid destruction. He then sought and scattered the 
force under Fremont, and was ready to give fierce 
battle to Shields who had come across the Blue Ridge 
from McDowell. Having already diverted McDowell's 
great corps from McClellan, he now himself hurried 
to join Lee. "Thus in thirty-five days Jackson's 
army had marched two hundred and forty-five miles, 
had fought three important battles, besides two 
minor ones, winning them all, and had practically 
destroyed three Union armies." 1 The next important 
movement in the valley led up to the greatest and 
most critical battle of the entire war. It was in 1863 
when Lee determined to execute the vast flank move- 
ment that should carry him down the Shenandoah, 
across the Potomac, through Maryland, into Pennsyl- 
vania. Nature had planned a spacious highway and 
walled it in. Through this avenue Lee would go, 
and transfer the seat of war from southern to north- 
ern soil. Once across the Pennsylvania line Lee 
turned to the right, entered the passes of the South 
Mountain, thus leaving the valley to the west, and 
met the Union army at Gettysburg. After the battle 
Lee withdrew across the Potomac, as he had come. 
Failing to reap all its advantages, the North had 
won a great victory, and at a most dramatic moment, 
— on the day when the future commander of the Poto- 
mac was receiving the capitulation of Vicksburg. 
In 1864 Grant was before Petersburg and Lee 

1 ""History of the United States," Adams and Trent, p. 391. 



THE CIVIL WAR 229 

sent Early to make in the valley the same kind of 
diversion that Jackson had made. Early was a 
fighter, but he was not Jackson ; and it was not 
McClellan now, but Grant, who stayed stubbornly 
where he was and sent Sheridan to take care of the 
Shenandoah. Early had even appeared before 
Washington, but was soon driven out of the valley 
by his foe, and the brilliant Irish soldier under 
Grant's orders proceeded to burn everything that 
could subsist an army. The Shenandoah Valley was 
a smoking ruin, and it was thereafter to know the 
pursuits of peace. 



CHAPTER VIII 

WHERE LITTLE RAIN FALLS 

New England, or the Great Lakes, or the South, 
offers us a single continuous region, but when we 
study the pattern of the West, it is a patchwork, 
made up of mountains and plateaus, and the latter 
are often so smooth and so girt about with moun- 
tains that we call them plains. And these plains are 
so dry that they have long been put in a bundle and 
called the arid lands. Their dry climate is the fea- 
ture which more than all others affects the lives and 
doings of men, and therefore we place under a com- 
mon title lands as remote from each other as the 
plains of western Kansas and the great valley of Cali- 
fornia. 

The westerly winds strike the edge of the conti- 
nent, heavily freighted with vapor from the warm 
Pacific Ocean. When these seas of moist air roll up 
the cooling slopes of the Pacific mountains, condensa- 
tion is rapid, and abundant rains and snows support 
the forests and feed the glaciers of these lofty lands. 
East of the mountain belt, which includes western 
Washington, Oregon, and much of California, the 
arid lands begin, and they include nearly all the ter- 
ritory eastward to about the hundredth meridian. 
This line runs through the Dakotas, central Ne- 

230 



WHERE LITTLE RAIN FALLS 23 1 

braska, and western Kansas. It is not the exact cli- 
matic boundary, but is nearest it, and it is easy to 
remember that eastward more than twenty inches of 
rain fall in a year, crops are raised without artificial 
watering, and we call the lands prairies. West of 
the line there is no sudden change either of climate 
or topography, but on the average the rainfall is less 
than twenty inches, and irrigation is needed, except 
in unusual seasons, or for crops that require but little 
water. 

From western Kansas to the Sierras is a solid arid 
country, save patches of mountain land which are 
cold enough to condense and comb out of the atmos- 
phere the water that yet remains after it has swept 
over the Pacific ranges. This area of dry land in 
the United States is enormous, and in much of Utah 
and Nevada the rainfall is less than ten inches, and 
in parts of Nevada and southwestern Arizona it is 
less than five. That an empire of a dozen states and 
territories should sometime lie in this arid country 
would not have been dreamed by the early explorers, 
who thought themselves lucky if they eluded the sav- 
age, and got water enough for man and beast. They 
wrote the region down upon the maps, at least so 
much of it as lay east of the Rocky Mountains, as 
the Great American Desert, and made it seem to the 
childish geographer behind his atlas at school as in- 
hospitable as the Desert of Gobi or the Sahara. In- 
deed, in such mistaught minds, a desert was a place 
where nothing could live or grow, for the world had 
not begun to learn its wealth of life, or to discover 
those changes of heredity and environment by which 



232 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

lowly populations are fitted to the dryest and wettest, 
the hottest and coldest, the steadiest and the most 
shifting conditions. 

There was no dearth of life on the Great Plains 
before the prairie schooner crossed them, or the swift 
train sped without hindrance from Omaha to Denver ; 
the savage knew the highways of the plains, the buf- 
falo and prairie dog made them populous, and the 
desert grasses thrived and kept the sands from 
nakedness. The green slopes of New England 
would be missed and might be sighed for, but the 
skies were always bright, the gray landscape had its 
own spell, and it was the land of the imagination, 
with vastness like the sea. 

When we cross the hundredth meridian, going west, 
we begin to be three thousand feet or more above the 
sea, and when we have reached the eastern base of 
the Rocky Mountains, in Wyoming or Colorado, our 
altitude is five or six thousand feet. We have crossed 
a plateau which has a gentle slant to the east. The 
rivers flow out of the mountains and down this upland 
floor toward the Mississippi. Such are the Missouri, 
the Platte, and the Arkansas. In many places in 
Kansas the Arkansas River and its branches flow 
almost on the surface of the country, or have cut 
shallow valleys, barely one or two hundred feet below 
the plains. There is good reason for this in the long, 
gentle slope over which the rivers must run, and in 
the soft and destructible strata in which they often 
work. The streams cannot have much velocity, 
hence their working power is small. And the land 
waste is so abundant that it clogs the streams, and 



234 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

they become, as the geographer says, " overloaded," 
and tend to struggle over a waste floor of their 
own making, frequently dividing into strands which 
reunite, making a " braided" river, such as the Platte 
often is. This tells why the French discoverers saw 
a torrent of muddy water when they passed the mouth 
of the Missouri — waters described by a modern wit- 
ness as "too thick for a beverage, too thin for food." 

Yet we must not let ourselves think that the coun- 
try is as smooth as it might appear to a tourist on 
the Union Pacific or Burlington Railway. The rocks 
are not all soft, but they are nearly always horizon- 
tal," and the weathering of the softer strata leaves 
the edges of the harder often outstanding in escarp- 
ments, or walls, that relieve the monotony. And in 
many parts of western Nebraska, and elsewhere, 
the fitful streams of this country and the perpetual 
weathering have cut the strata into a maze of scarps 
and slopes, which remain utterly naked and barren, 
through failure of herb and tree, and make what the 
early French voyageurs called mauvaises terres, bad 
lands — bad to them because they were hard to travel 
over, as bad they must always remain, save for weird 
scenery and their great harvests of fossil remains, 
which have kept many scholars to their tasks and 
filled many museums. 

In some parts, too, the winds have shifted the 
waste and done what they could to give variety to 
the land surface. This has especially happened 
along the rivers, which have made the earth and 
sand available for wind action. The contoured 
maps of the plains will often show, by the crowd- 



WHERE LITTLE RAIN FALLS 235 

ing of small circles and ellipses, great patches of 
such dunes on the leeward side of the Platte, the 
Arkansas, and lesser streams. 

The land is not, then, absolutely smooth, for rivers 
and winds and weathering have diversified it much, 
but reliefs of a few hundred feet count for little 
when the eye sweeps vast areas, reaching from 
Dakota to Texas. 

There is a central belt of the Great Plains which 
is smoother than the rest. It runs through Nebraska 
and Kansas and into Texas, and has been distin- 
guished as the High Plains. We can better under- 
stand them if we go back to the origin of the Great 
Plains as a whole. Under these lies a vast floor of 
older beds of marine origin. After this sea floor was 
uplifted it was overswept for long by river torrents 
from the young and high mountains on the west. 
These torrents wandered this way and that, and laid 
down the materials that now form the surface parts 
of the plains. Thus there is a veneer of younger 
waste, often five hundred feet thick, carpeting a 
floor of harder and more ancient rocks. 

In this central area there is rain enough to allow 
the forming of a sod, which is firm enough to check 
erosion by rain and by small streams. Hence, the 
old debris plain is almost perfect in its preservation. 
West of it, however, as in eastern Colorado, there is 
less rain, no real turf can form, and yet the streams 
from the mountains are more forceful than farther 
east, because nearer the rain belt of the Rockies. 
Hence, though it seems a contradiction, the semi- 
arid, middle belt is smoother, and has suffered less 



236 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

erosion than the arid belt west of it or the well- 
watered prairies east of it. The character of this 
singular land, with its horizon like that of the ocean, 
can be read in a recent report of the United States 
Geological Survey. 1 

As distinguished from the still drier plains on the 
west, the High Plains became known as the "rain 
belt," and there followed on this several years of 
the most disastrous experiment in agriculture ever 
tried in the United States. Every one knew of the 
fertility of the prairies, and the prairies lapped well 
over into central Kansas and Nebraska. So the 
inrushing settlers, from 1885 to 1895, failed to mark 
that vague but stern boundary which separated the 
regions of ample and deficient rainfall. 

As if fate were in league with their ignorance, 
there were in this period several seasons of increased 
rainfall ; and it was bravely asserted that the climate 
was changing, and some thought the plow was 
doing it, and that any region once plowed and set 
with patches of trees would woo the rains. 

In earlier days, when the westward extension of 
slavery was pending, Kansas had seen storms that 
rivaled her tornadoes. But she never perhaps saw 
so much suffering or enacted so large a social and 
geographical experiment as when excited emigrants 
from the East, or men who found no place in Illinois 
or Iowa, rushed across the one hundredth meridian 
and began to take up quarter sections, lay out cities 
by the square mile, build county seats and court- 

1 " The High Plains and their Utilization," by Willard D. Johnson, 
Part IV, Twenty- first Annual Report U. S. Geological Survey, 



WHERE LITTLE RAIN FALLS 237 

houses and palatial schoolhouses, and boom the 
country. One might expect such conditions at Vir- 
ginia City a generation ago, or at Cripple Creek in 
later years, but hardly on the dull, endless acres of 
western Kansas. 

The men who worked the boom did not bring their 
money in their pockets or draw their checks on east- 
ern bank accounts. The checks were drawn in the 
East, but by men and women who, with equal haste, 
accepted mortgages upon lands they never saw, lands 
which, with square miles enough, would raise cattle, 
but would not raise wheat. When the bubble col- 
lapsed, many men had learned many things. One 
dry season after another taught them that the climate 
had not changed. The boom towns did not fill up ; 
the farmers had no money with which to pay interest, 
to say nothing of principal. Banks and loan com- 
panies failed, the eastern lender and western bor- 
rower had hard feelings toward each other, and the 
one became wisely conservative about western invest- 
ments, and the other learned economy in a hard school, 
either by sticking to the ground, or after his prairie 
schooner had carried him back to Illinois or over into 
Oklahoma. 

A people pressed for ready money is a people ready 
to hold and preach extraordinary doctrines, and thus 
we are able to see how the populistic wave of antago- 
nism to eastern financial ideas swept the plains, and 
how a large political and social movement grew out 
of the failure of a frontier population to adjust itself 
properly to geographic conditions. 

We can see how this adjustment has now come, and 



238 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

that these commonwealths may now look safely for- 
ward to an era of unbroken progress. Kansas in- 
creased her population between 1870 and 1888 by 
much more than a million. Her numbers were quad- 
rupled in that period. She now knows that there is a 
limit to the people she can support, especially in her 
western counties. She has found that only here and 
there can these lands be watered. They are too far 
from the sources of supply in the Rocky Mountains. 
Too much water has been evaporated, or has soaked 
away, or has been drawn into Colorado ditches, or it 
flows, as in Arkansas, too low to be run out on the 
uplands. The artesian supply will be small and con- 
fined to special places. Smaller population, more 
grazing, and forage crops that will thrive in a dry 
climate — such are the secrets of adjustment which 
have now been learned. The Kaffir corn product 
alone is now worth millions of dollars every year, and 
here, as in Nebraska on the north, the cow is known 
as a "mortgage lifter." 

The Llano Estacado of Texas is the southern con- 
tinuation of the High Plains of Kansas ; but its true 
nature as a plateau is more visible because, on the 
east and south, it fronts the seaboard lowlands by a 
steep wall formed as the streams have gnawed back 
into the upland, and on the west the Pecos Valley 
separates it from the mountains. The region is hot 
and almost too dry even for pasturage. And yet as 
much rain falls here as upon the wheat lands of 
Dakota, but the difference is in the spasmodic charac- 
ter of the rains, the greater evaporation, and low rela- 
tive humidity. The amount of rainfall does not 



WHERE LITTLE RAIN FALLS 239 

assure paying tillage of the soil, for many things 
must be counted in. A region may seem to have 
water enough, but it may fall at the wrong season of 
the year, when it can do crops no good. Thus storage 
is added to the great bundle of irrigation problems. 

Irrigation, indeed, is of universal interest west of 
the one hundredth meridian, and has become in many 




inge, Western 



ways of national importance. And yet few saw this 
until within the last two or three years. National 
recognition came with the opening of a new century, 
and long before its close fifty millions of people may 
be dependent on this phase of agriculture, and the 
society of the West will be profoundly molded by it. 
Seven and one-half millions of acres are now made 
productive by artificial watering within the United 



240 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

States, and the work is only in its beginnings. Before 
1900 a proposition to give federal direction to irriga- 
tion was met by a united protest from the press of the 
East that this was a scheme to take money from the 
eastern farmer to give it to his brother in the West. 
It is now seen that more than one-third of the United 
States must depend on irrigation. It is not merely 
the value that lies in the soils that is in question, but 
the profitable development of every natural resource 
of the West, for food cannot permanently be brought 
across half a continent to provide for a vast and stable 
society. 

We know now, also, that only a fraction (about one- 
tenth) of all the dry land can be irrigated, because 
there is water enough for this and no more. It be- 
comes, therefore, a question of wisdom in the use of 
water, of the right choice of lands, of the proper 
crops, of skillful handling, and of a conserving use for 
grazing of lands that cannot be brought " under the 
ditch." Irrigation means, also, intensive agriculture, 
for economy requires the use of the shortest canals, 
the fewest weirs, the least machinery, and the largest 
cropping of small fields. And this means small hold- 
ings, a compact rural society approaching the con- 
ditions of the town, with convenient churches and 
schools, the best roads, telephones, free delivery of 
mails, and constant social life, divesting the farm of 
its ancient narrowness and loneliness. Such is the 
attractive picture presented in a recent writing, 1 — 
whether too sanguine or not we will not affirm, — but 
suggesting that at length the germs of discontent and 

1 Guy E. Mitchell, in Forestry and Irrigation, January, 1903. 



WHERE LITTLE RAIN FALLS 241 

anarchy in the cities may be made harmless by bringing 
out of the slums the men and the women that would 
with opportunity respond to the call of a better life. 

Irrigation is national in other ways, for millions 
of people, frugal and wealth-producing, would thus 
be added to our population, ready to spend vast 
sums for articles manufactured in the East ; while 
the growth of cities in the East, and the diffusion of 
money there, would enrich the farmer of the older 
states as well. Within a few years, also, bulletin after 
bulletin has appeared from the presses of the United 
States Department of Agriculture, dealing with irri- 
gation experiments and results in humid regions. 
Every farmer knows that he loses half or far more 
than half of some crops because of the failure of 
rains at the critical time. More and more out of the 
principles established in western experience will the 
eastern farmer profit. Especially will this be true of 
crops which, like fruit, are especially dependent on 
water, and are grown on compact areas. Gradually 
the skinning processes, so well known in American 
agriculture, will disappear, and their place will be 
taken by intensive tillage, small farms, special crops 
adapted to locality, closely settled lands which are 
indeed communities ; and the unhappy line which 
makes the city a slum and the country a wilderness 
may be at least relieved, though it be a large hope 
that it should disappear. 

Those who frown on federal supervision have not 
considered the inherent difficulties of irrigation policy 
and law. The early settler takes up a claim, cuts a 
ditch, and uses the water. He has a prior right, but 



242 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

others come and water rights become involved. Long 
and big ditches and storage reservoirs are needed, 
and the corporation replaces the individual and the 
difficulties thicken. Finally a great river like the 
Missouri or Arkansas crosses the boundaries of 
states, and even state governments become helpless 
to protect their citizens. It would not be fair for 
Colorado to stop all the water of the Arkansas, leav- 
ing but a dry river bed in Kansas. Only federal 
authority can adjudicate such claims as this, or pro- 
vide for the fair and continuous economic progress 
of this great western domain. In March, 1902, the 
United States Senate performed its part in enacting 
the new irrigation law, without a dissenting vote and 
without so much as a roll-call, and it seems at last to 
be recognized that the arid lands and the forests of 
America are as proper subjects of legislative atten- 
tion as our manufacturing or our shipping. 

In President Roosevelt's first message to Congress 
he said, "The forest and water problems are per- 
haps the most vital internal questions of the United 
States." He rightly puts these questions on their 
highest ground. They do not belong to the mere 
technique of agriculture ; they pertain to the making 
of homes, to the right use of our greatest resources ; 
they are social and economic problems that effect our 
whole national life. 

In a recent report President Wheeler of the Uni- 
versity of California included a department of irriga- 
tion among the immediate needs of the school, and 
such a department was almost at once established. 
More or less instruction in this field is given in all 



WHERE LITTLE RAIN FALLS 243 

the agricultural colleges and higher schools of the 
arid region. Somewhat over seven million acres, as 
we have seen, are now watered in the arid states and 
territories, which are eleven in number. California 
and Colorado are at the top of the list with more than 
one million acres each. But in the western United 
States there is believed to be water enough to irrigate 
sixty million acres. This means that but one-eighth 
of the work has yet been done, and a map showing 
the watered areas of the West is barely specked with 
the black patches used to represent them. Professor 
Elwood Mead compares the Missouri with the Nile. 
The African river supports five million people with 
its fertilizing waters, while our own great river and 
its branches can be made to water three times as 
much land as is now cultivated along the Nile. There 
are now fifty thousand miles of irrigating ditches in 
this country. The cost of them has been enormous, 
and yet upon authority we are told that " the total 
cost of all the irrigation works in use in the country 
is only three-fourths of the value of the crops pro- 
duced each year on irrigated lands." 

In Colorado the latest figures give more than 
1,600,000 acres under the ditch. The state has 
thus outstripped California in its extent of watered 
land, though not in the value of the products, for 
some valuable fruits of the Pacific state will not 
grow in the colder climate of the Rocky Moun- 
tains. The agriculture of Colorado has often pro- 
duced more annual value than its mining ; but both 
go together, for the miner gets subsistence and the 
farmer gains a market, so that, with cities, farms, 



244 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

railways, and mines, Colorado has fast risen to the 
complete possessions of a civilized and advanced 
community, and few richer or finer regions can be 
found than that which stretches along the eastern 
foot of the Front Range past Boulder and Greeley. 
If the one is known for its university, the other has 




Fig. 51. Dust Whirl in the Desert, Western Utah. 

its potatoes and alfalfa, and is not without its normal 
school, and both together typify the vigorous, untir- 
ing life which has grown out of a desert by right use 
of soil, sunlight, and mountain streams. The value 
of crops grown by irrigation in 1899 in Colorado 
was more than $15,000,000. The settlers at Greeley 
in 1870 were second only to the Mormons of Utah 
in the early beginnings in the reclamation of dry 
soils ; but now the watered lands of the state border 



WHERE LITTLE RAIN FALLS 



245 



the Rocky Mountain front, stretch down the South 
Platte River into Nebraska, and form great patches 
on the Rio Grande, and also on the Gunnison, and 
the Grand, beyond the Continental Divide. 

West of the Wasatch Mountains and east of the 
Sierras is a land which we know as the Great Basin. 
We call it so because it has no drainage to the sea. 
The mountain slopes that border it are well 




Fig. 52. Great Salt Lake. 

watered, and some rain falls everywhere upon its 
surface ; but not enough to fill up its central lowlands 
and pour across the bounding divides upon the slopes 
that lead to the Pacific. The western half of Utah 
and the whole state of Nevada occupy the greater 
part of this basin. Many swift streams rush through 
the gorges of the Wasatch ; but their goal is not the 
sea, for the remnant of water that is not dissipated in 
soil and air mingles with the shallow brines of Great 
Salt Lake. With more than temperate heat, and with 
little rainfall, the air is like a dry sponge, and absorbs 



246 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

so much of the scanty moisture that the lakes cannot 
fill up and run to the sea. Hence the minerals dis- 
solved from the surrounding lands and brought into 
Great Salt Lake cannot escape, and they completely 
saturate its waters. 

Within the basin itself are many mountains, though 
they do not rival in breadth or height the bordering 
ranges. They run parallel to each other and from 
north to south, and are separated from each other by 
smooth areas that make up the general floor of the 
basin. This floor is especially flat and wide around 
Great Salt Lake, and southward. 

If we look out over the fields and gardens that 
blossom at the base of the Wasatch, and would know 
the meaning of the soils, we must lift our eyes to the 
lower slopes of the mountains. It will take no skill 
to see horizontal platforms cut as strong lines on the 
mountain sides, and some of them are formed as high 
as one thousand feet above the lake and the railways. 
They are not such forms as streams and rain wash 
make on a mountain. Instead of ravines and but- 
tressed ridges, we find what might be railway grades. 

They could only be made by the waves of a body 
of water, and they mark the days when the Great 
Salt Lake was 1050 feet deep (it is now less than fifty) ; 
when it was not salt at all, but found a northward out- 
let into the Snake River, the Columbia, and the sea, 
and when the climate was therefore far more cool and 
moist than it is to-day. The reader has already been 
asked to imagine the wide flats that would greet his 
eye if Lake Erie or Lake Michigan could be drained. 
Here is a similar case : the ancient lake in Utah was 



WHERE LITTLE RAIN FALLS 247 

as large as Lake Huron and deeper ; into its waters 
floated the waste of the uplands, and sinking it formed 
the mud plains which have been uncovered by the 
drying away of the lake. If we ask when all this 
happened, we can only answer that this era of cool and 
wet climate seems to have been contemporaneous with 
the glaciers and great glacial lakes of the East. 

We need not look for any finer instance of geo- 
graphic control of the forms of land and water and of 
the ultimate doings of men. The earth's crust had to 
be wrinkled and broken to raise the mountains that 
bound the basin and run along its floor. Their wast- 
ing was made swift by the abundant waters that not 
only formed an inland sea, but brought the ruins of 
the land to rest in it ; and a change of climate, as yet 
unexplained, dried away the waters, until but a salty 
patch is left, leaving the wide plains dry and barren, 
and compelling man to guide out of their natural chan- 
nels and use with economy the streams that remain. 
This the Mormon colonist began, more than fifty years 
ago, to do. It was the only way in which a commu- 
nity could then live in so distant a wilderness, and it 
continues to be the only way in which a commonwealth 
can prosper even in the days of great railways and 
swift communication. 

As on the Great Plains so in the Great Basin it is 
an economic fact of greatest meaning that the water 
supply avails for but a fraction of the land. We shall 
never see a thousand miles of wheat and corn, as one 
might see on the Mississippi prairies. But here is 
little land of absolute dearth ; grasses grow, and their 
nutritious qualities outlast the process of drying, and 



248 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

keep alive the roving herds even when snows cover 
the mountains of the horizon. Millions of sheep be- 
long to the wealth of Utah, and cattle not a few. 

The Colorado colony at Greeley and the settlers of 
Utah were the pioneers in irrigation, and have dem- 
onstrated that states can be built and can thrive upon 
this mode of tilling the soil. Hereafter it is only a 
question of using the experience of the past, with the 
necessary capital, to achieve like gains in New Mex- 
ico, Arizona, and other parts of the West. 

Centuries ago aboriginal peoples made ditches and 
watered their crops in what is now Arizona, and the 
later Indian inhabitants were doing the same when 
the white man came. Nature has one unvarying com- 
mand when man insists on dwelling in that dry and 
heated country. He must use the water with economy, 
and use as much of it as he can. 

Northern Arizona will never be made into farms, 
for it belongs to that high plateau, cool and rocky, 
through which the Colorado has worn its great canyon. 
It has a fair rainfall, however, and will have its quota 
of prosperity through its pasturage. The southern 
and western districts are much lower, and they are 
hotter and drier as well ; for at Phoenix, and westward, 
the rainfall is not above five inches in a year, and 
the average temperature is that of New Orleans. 

The Gila River rises on the eastern border of the 
territory, and crosses it to the west and south, entering 
the Colorado at Yuma, and it is in the low and tropical 
basin of this river that man is finding a home. The 
irrigated lands of the Gila River are already worth 
millions of dollars, and without such use of water 



WHERE LITTLE RAIN FALLS 249 

there could never be anything here but tropical deserts 
and desolate uplands, crossed by the railways and vis- 
ited by the tourist and explorer. Here it is proposed 
to make one of the beginnings in federal aid and super- 
vision by building on the Gila River what is known 
as the San Carlos dam. By erecting a dam some- 
what more than two hundred feet from the bed rock, 
enough water can be held in reserve to water two 
hundred and fifty thousand acres of land. If this can 
be done, the million dollars which the reservoir will 
cost will be a trivial outlay for so large a return, and 
would be far more than earned in any single year 
after the land is fairly under cultivation. 

Similar to the Arizona lowlands is the Colorado 
desert of southeastern California, and this whole Col- 
orado region may gather an importance all its own 
through the cultivation of tropical fruits. The De- 
partment of Agriculture at Washington is now coop- 
erating with the University of Arizona in supporting 
at Tempe, near Phoenix, an experimental garden for 
date palms. These trees need plenty of water for 
the roots, a hot, dry atmosphere for the foliage, and 
winters not too severe. The tree will flourish in 
Florida, but the southern summer is neither hot nor 
dry enough to mature the fruit. It is at home in the 
Sahara, and at a single point in southeastern Spain. 
In 1900 the Department brought from Algeria shoots 
of the best varieties, and experiments are now in 
progress in Arizona and California. The fruit will 
not ripen unless the mean temperature exceeds 8o° 
for a month in the summer, with a mean of jo° from 
May to October. The soils, however, must be moist, 



250 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

and will not injure the plant if they are alkaline, as 
is often the case in arid regions. Earlier experiments 
have been tried here, and a single tree, eight years 
from the seed, bore four hundred pounds of fruit in a 
season. The Colorado Desert in California is thought 
to be the best date region in the New World. It 
would be deeply interesting if this land of perpetual 
heat and cloudless skies could be so watered as to 
grow rich with this Old World fruit. 

Little attempt has been made to use the water of 
the Colorado River. For much of its course the 
deep canyons prevent all diversion to the adjoining 
lands, but there is no good reason why considerable 
patches of the hot desert farther south should not be 
reclaimed. Some of this land in southern California 
lies three hundred feet below the sea level, being 
isolated from the Gulf of California by the delta of 
the river. Exceptional floods now and then break 
across the river banks and form a lake in this de- 
pressed area, a lake which is at length destroyed by 
soakage and evaporation. If nature can do this, man 
might make canals serve a like purpose. His great- 
est obstacle would be the silting of the ditches by the 
waste with which the river is heavily loaded. 

Along with a new reservoir on the Gila River, it is 
proposed to control the waters of St. Mary River in 
Montana, keep them from running their natural 
course into Canada, and turn them into the head 
waters of the Missouri, and make them the means of 
reclaiming, on their way, several hundred thousand 
acres of land. Whether such diversion of waters 
might become a still wider question is a problem for 



WHERE LITTLE RAIN FALLS 251 

those familiar with international law. It would not 
be difficult at least to raise the question of equity on 
our southern border, if erelong the progress of agri- 
culture in Colorado and New Mexico should dry up 
the Rio Grande and destroy the value of lands that 
lie across the Mexican boundary and have been for 
generations refreshed by the waters of the river. 

America is surely not a good field for showing 
what, in the long run, geographic environment can 
do with a people. History is here too short, and the 
tree is but a sapling, not bearing its mature fruits. 
And our people have scarcely recovered from the 
shock of migration, and we do not know to what 
account our changes should be charged. And we 
are a mixture of races, forming something as yet new 
and unknown, and who can tell how much is due to 
country and how much to amalgamation? No result 
may fairly be called final, and no type has been per- 
fected. We can only study beginnings. 

We know well what the desert type of society has 
always been, — nomadic and tribal, without cities, 
without settled interests, and almost without tillage 
of the soil. Flocks and herds were appropriate to 
the wastes of the Orient, familiar to us in many 
annals of the Old Testament, and in the tales of 
many a traveler. The heat of the plains, the keen- 
ness of the sun, the coolness of shadow, the precious- 
ness of springs, — these are the earmarks of desert 
literature. Houses must be tents, or something easily 
renewed, in a migrating society, and the garb must 
protect from heat by day and the chill air by night. 
Or, if life is more settled, the primitive man or the 



252 



GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 



pioneer must build his hut as he can ; if he is in the 
"short grass" country, that is, on the high plains, 
he uses sod, and in the arid belt, or "bunch grass" 
country, he must have recourse to " adobe," or sun- 
dried mud. 

An environment so pronounced could not be without 
its distinct power over thought and spirit. Nowhere 






Fig. 53. Desert Valley at the Base of the House Range, Utah. The 
skeleton is that of a horse. The lower part of the valley is un- 
chained, holds a shallow lake after a storm, and is covered with a 
fine earth, " adobe," containing gypsum and salt. 



is this more finely seen than in the literature of the 
Bible, perhaps superlatively in the Psalms. In the 
desert the very insects seem to catch the spirit of 
the place and make themselves over into a protective 
oneness with its gray and neutral tones. And the 
dweller in verdant lands, entering the desert wastes 
with a recoil from their dryness and silence and soli- 
tariness, finds himself after a time bound by their 



WHERE LITTLE RAIN FALLS 253 

spell. He has never breathed air so pure and so 
purged from all odors, he has never looked into such 
measureless depths of stars, he never knew or dreamed 
that the desert could be so full of life, that its trails 
and water pockets, its grasses and its sage-brush, its 
coyotes and jack-rabbits, its rocks and its bordering 
mountains, all conspire to make a world in the wilder- 
ness. " The absence of dark green is soon not noticed, 
for the grays, reds, browns, and yellows are so quiet, 
so soothing, so varying in their intensity, and so 
thoroughly mingled that their quality cannot but be 
constantly in mind. To see the grand colors of a 
deep brown cliff brought out in a clear moonlight is 
to see one of the most wonderful effects. In the desert 
tints, as in the green of the humid country, the value 
of shadows in bringing out the quality and the 
contrast is not to be overlooked. In fact, after we 
become accustomed to the desert range of colors, the 
green of an oasis comes with a shock, like a mis- 
placed touch in a beautiful picture." 1 

Arid America will not be, in just this way, the land 
of the imagination, when the American of to-day has 
tried his hand upon it. If there were water enough, 
he would moisten it all, and make it as populous as 
Massachusetts ; but nature will have her way with 
much of it, and man will cross it with his railways and 
range over it with his herds, but he may only settle it 
here and there. But where man does conquer a dry 
wilderness, the change is absolute and profound. In- 
stead of a nomad, we shall find dense and deep-rooted 

1 " Life Amid Desert Conditions," R. E. Dodge, Bulletin American 
Geographical Society, Vol. XXXIV, p. 416, 1902. 



254 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

communities, like jewels in wide settings of gray 
desert. In a large settlement the single farmer can- 
not make his own ditch from the river, but there must 
be communal or government action. This, with small 
farms, intensive tillage, and close contacts every- 
where, compels an approach to socialistic conditions 
that may never be reached on the watered prairies or 
among the Appalachians, where in some larger meas- 
ure each man can be a law to himself. 

Indeed, most of the embarrassment and embittering 
litigation of the arid country has arisen from an 
unconscious attempt to apply the old English law, 
made for a moist country, that allows a man to con- 
trol the water that flows past or across his land. It 
has been well said that in an arid country water is 
like sunshine and air, and to monopolize it is infamous. 

The young state of Wyoming has led the way in 
brushing aside the injustice of ancient customs, and 
the burden of unfit statute, and placing under just 
public regulation all the waters within her boundaries. 
She is fast being followed by older states, and we may 
look with amazement upon a flourishing common- 
wealth, less than thirteen years a member of the Union, 
rising in population, strong in agriculture and in 
mining interests, with a well-developed educational 
system and an enlightened government, where a 
generation ago there appeared a high and barren 
plateau beset with rugged mountains. 



CHAPTER IX 

MOUNTAIN, MINE, AND FOREST 

The East has its mountain ranges and they are 
covered with forests ; but the mountains are low and 
in no important degree do they hold deposits of gold, 
silver, copper, or lead, and they are set in the midst 
of a moist rather than an arid land. The mountain 
ranges of the West are far from the older home of 
civilization on this continent, and the conditions of 
human life are as different as well could be from 
those of the East. 

Colorado is in many ways the typical western state. 
Its mountains are broad and high ; it supplies some 
of the sources of every great river in the West 
except the Columbia ; it has unequaled mineral re- 
sources ; irrigates more land than any other state ; 
and has, in addition to its mountains, an area of the 
Great Plains on the one hand and a part of the Colo- 
rado plateaus on the other. Pike entered this land 
in 1807, Long in 1819, and Fremont in 1843. Gold 
was found in the Platte Valley in 1858, a territory 
was organized in 1861, and it became a state in the 
Union in the centennial year of American indepen- 
dence. It has a composite people, with all the quali- 
ties of the West, and has come in fifty years to an 
advanced civilization. 

255 



256 



GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 



In 1893 a historical and descriptive pamphlet was 
prepared to accompany the state's exhibit at the Co- 
lumbian Exposition. Upon its cover were placed the 
seal of the commonwealth, a mine gang at work, a 
view of irrigated fields in the Poudre Valley, a potato, 




Fig. 54. A Mountain Highway, Ute Pass, near Manitou. 



and the state Capitol building done in native granite. 
If a university had been included and a mountain 
railway, the representation would have been com- 
plete. The world has few such products to show for 
a half century of development. 

Colorado is a quadrangle more than twice as large 
as the Empire State. North and south across the 



MOUNTAIN, MINE. AND FOREST 257 

central parts of the state lie the Rocky Mountains, a 
name that ought not to be used of mountains farther 
west. We may, however, carry the name northward 
into Wyoming and Montana, and southward into 
New Mexico. This means that the eastern ranges 
of the Cordilleran system are properly the Rocky 
Mountains. 

East of the mountains, more than one-third of Col- 
orado belongs to the Great Plains, looking toward 
Kansas and the Mississippi River. West of the 
Rockies is a region high, often rocky and barren, 
which continues into Utah and Arizona, and is a part 
of the plateau drained by the Colorado River. Its 
surface is much more broken than that of the Great 
Plains ; for it is beset with lofty and pinnacled moun- 
tains, like the San Juan in the southwest, and the 
rugged and tangled Elk Mountains farther north; and 
it is carved by deep gorges like the Black Canyon 
of the Gunnison, and the canyon of the Grand River. 

Nor is the Rocky Mountain Range simple and 
single ; for it is made up of several north and south 
belts of mountains, separated from each other by 
broad and almost treeless valleys, which by a perver- 
sity of language are known as parks. Thus as one 
comes from the eastern plains he sees the Front 
Range looming on the horizon back of Denver, or 
south of the Arkansas it is the Wet Mountain 
Range or the Sangre de Cristo. Back of these 
mountains is a chain of parks, — North, Middle, 
South, Huerfano, and San Luis. These are smooth 
floors sloping gently up to the base of the mountains 
all around, and from six to seven thousand feet 



258 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

above the sea. Their strata are young and loosely 
put together, having been washed in by mountain 
streams from every side. North of the Arkansas 
River the parks are too cold for grain and fruit, but 
yield pasturage. To the south, as in San Luis 
Valley, along the upper Rio Grande, thousands of 
acres are under the ditch. West of North and Mid- 
dle parks is the Park Range, a part of the Conti- 
nental Divide. West of South Park is the Mosquito 
Range and the Sawatch, the latter separating the 
Atlantic and Pacific waters; and between the Mos- 
quito and the Sawatch is the open, longitudinal valley 
of the upper Arkansas River, which turns at Salida 
and passes, by the Royal Gorge, through the moun- 
tains to the plains. West of San Luis Park are the 
heights of the San Juan. 

Perhaps best by a study of the drainage does 
one learn and remember the physiognomy of a new 
country. On the east the South Platte and Ar- 
kansas extend many slender fingers up the slopes 
and gather the abundant moisture of the mountains. 
The Platte reaches into South Park, and the Arkan- 
sas into the heart of the mountains around Leadville. 
The North Park drains by the North Platte out into 
Wyoming ; while to the south into New Mexico 
flows the Rio Grande. On the west the Grand flows 
from Middle Park, the Gunnison from Marshall Pass, 
the Animas from the southwest, and the White and 
Yampa from the northwest. Colorado has not gla- 
ciers to feed its streams, but it does scatter its waters 
in every direction, like the Po, the Rhone, the Dan- 
ube, and the Rhine, coming from Alpine sources. 



MOUNTAIN, MINE, AND FOREST 259 

We shall have a suitable idea of Colorado if 
we think of it as an upland whose general surface 
is from 4000 to 7000 feet above the sea, with long 
and strong ranges of mountains resting on it, and 
rearing many peaks to heights of a little more than 
14,000 feet. If the land mass of Florida were so 
graded as to be everywhere of equal height above the 
level of the ocean, this average altitude would be 100 
feet. The average altitude of New York is about 900 
feet, that of Oregon is 3300 feet, and of Colo- 
rado, the highest of all the states, 6800 feet. Thus 
a rarefied atmosphere is to be added to our catalogue 
of conditions that here make up the environment of 
man. 

Nearly as many kinds of natural causes for the 
growth of towns can be found in Colorado as would 
reward inquiry in any other state. These causes 
sometimes lie close at hand, and often in the more 
general conditions. Denver belongs to the latter class. 
It might, so far as the stream is concerned, have been 
at any other point on the South Platte River. But it 
is on the plains, where it was accessible to all lines of 
railway. On the east is the long approach from the 
Mississippi River. From Wyoming on the north and 
New Mexico on the south the lines of traffic follow 
the eastern base of the mountains. And twelve miles 
to the west the Clear Creek passes from the mountains 
to the plains. In the deep narrow valleys of this 
stream and its branches are the older mining camps, 
which developed forty years ago and ran the output 
of gold and silver far into the millions. For the sale 
of ores and the entrance of supplies Denver was the 



260 



GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 



center, and such it has remained, as remoter and richer 
masses of ore have been brought to light in later 
years throughout the state. It is the business and 
financial headquarters of the Rocky Mountains and 
the metropolis of the region between Kansas City or 
Omaha and San Francisco. It has a relative impor- 
tance which no town of its size could have in the East. 




Fig. 55. Product of a Leadville Smelter. The " Pigs " contain Silver, 
Gold, Lead, and Copper. 

A village added to Toledo would bring it up to Denver 
with its 134,000 people. Rochester has 28,000 more 
people than Denver, while Newark equals Colorado's 
four largest towns combined and has 50,000 to spare. 
But Denver is the focus of larger interests than belong 
to any of these eastern cities, and we are not to forget 
that Denver dates from 1858, that she had but 35,000 
people in 1880, and that she trebled her population in 
the next ten years. 



MOUNTAIN, MINE, AND FOREST 261 

The resident of Colorado Springs makes light and 
cheerful reference to the population of " lungers," 
of which perchance he is one, and tells you that the 
place is " a very good Siberia." But as a land of 
exile he does not seriously regard it, nor should he. 
The town was founded through the force of an unusual 
motive, for in the summer of 1871 its site was delib- 
erately chosen for a health resort. The dry air, the 
towering Pike's Peak and lovely Cheyenne Mountain, 
the springs of Manitou, and the weird monuments of 
the Garden of the Gods, with natural routes of travel 
along the plains and through the passes of the Front 
Range, — these make the geographic foundation ; 
while thirty-five years ago it could not have been fore- 
seen that the richest mining district now open in the 
state, at Cripple Creek, would be largely tributary to 
Colorado Springs. 

Pueblo was a village of less than a thousand in 
1870, and is now the second town in Colorado. Sev- 
eral conditions combine to rear a city. It is on the 
highway leading south from Denver ; it is on the 
Arkansas River at the gateway of the Rocky Moun- 
tains ; it is within easy hauling distance of ores, coal, 
and flux, and draws tribute from the agricultural belt 
along the Arkansas River above and below. 

Thus the three largest towns of Colorado occupy 
similar sites at the eastern foot of the mountains ; 
none of them are surrounded by mineral deposits, but 
the three owe much of their wealth to the stores so 
long hidden in the mountains on the west. 

Of the mining towns are Aspen in the west ; Creede 
in the south ; Ouray, Silverton, and Rico in the San 



262 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

Juan ; Cripple Creek in the east; — we pass them and 
take Leadville, in the center of Colorado, two miles 
above sea level, in the heart of the mountains. It 
does not require long in America for gold, or silver, 
or gas, or oil, to make a town. The mining that made 
Leadville was not the first in the neighborhood. Cali- 
fornia Gulch cuts the Mosquito Range east of the 
upper Arkansas. Here Tabor, later a senator of the 
United States, and his partner washed the placer 
gravels and cleaned up $75,000 in sixty days. They 
and others were always annoyed by masses of heavy 
iron-stained rock that clogged the sluices ; but these 
alien pieces of mineral proved to belong to the silver- 
bearing carbonates that would yield untold millions. 
From a mine salted by one " Chicken Bill," and 
refused by Denver buyers who found out the trick, 
Tabor afterward took $1,500,000, and then sold it 
for an equal sum. A mine sold in the morning for 
$50,000 was bought back by the same parties in the 
evening for $225,000. Where in 1877 there was a 
post-office with 200 people, there was in 1879 the 
second city of Colorado, with a population of 15,000. 
A year later there were almost thirty miles of streets, 
gas, water, thirteen schools, and five churches. 

Unlike some boom towns its life continues, though 
more quietly. The count of 1900 showed 12,000 
people and more ; and you may enter Leadville by 
rail from the east, south, and west, and regulating 
your steps with moderation needful to a "tender- 
foot" at an altitude of two miles, may wander 
among the dump heaps of Carbonate Hill, descend 
the shafts, visit the smelters, or look off upon the 



MOUNTAIN, MINE, AND FOREST 263 

rocky crests and snowy gorges of the Continental 
Divide. 

The mining interests of Colorado have been about 
equally distributed on the two sides of the Conti- 
nental Divide. West of the mountains is Aspen, 
which for several years was one of the first mining 
camps in the West. Here is the Mollie Gibson Mine 
from which $60,000 in value were once taken in 
eight hours. One car of ore weighing twenty-four 
tons was worth $76,500. One hardly need say that 
such cars were protected, en route to the smelters, 
by armed guards. 

We have seen how the need of irrigation forces 
a recasting of the laws concerning water. Thus 
mining has its code, one point of which is that the 
lode or vein, which often is not far from vertical, can 
be followed to the depths by the owner of its outcrop, 
even though it runs beneath his neighbor's claim. 
But at Aspen and Leadville "blanket lodes" were 
found, which in geological phrase means that the ore- 
bearing mass is not a vein, but a bed. Now a bed is 
often horizontal, and it would be clearly unjust to 
allow it to be followed indefinitely. Both veins and 
blanket lodes run so indefinitely, that in a rich region 
the courts are full of claims, representing a fierce 
underground war for the treasures of the mountains. 

Another great cluster of mining communities has 
grown up in the rugged San Juan corner of Colorado, 
so that the excitements and fascinations of the claim, 
the tunnel and the shaft, often overshadow the more 
sober but equally rich agricultural interests of the 
Centennial State. Yet here, as everywhere in the 



264 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

western country, the crude life and unsystematic 
methods of prospecting, mining, and ore reduction 
have largely given way to systematic, scientific oper- 
ations, with abundant capital and sober business 
management 

Many things must be remembered if we would un- 
derstand the human type which is unfolding in these 
mountains. The cowboy does not typify the life of 
the plains and Rocky Mountain plateaus, though we 
could not know its beginnings or fully understand its 
quality without studying him. Nor does the miner, 
to whom we are introduced in Bret Harte's tales, re- 
flect all, or the most, that is to be found in the Rock- 
ies and the Sierras ; yet he does most truly enter into 
it, and we could not know the West if we left him 
out. 

He is the hardy spirit who in 1 849 or the decades that 
followed found eastern life too cramped to suit him, 
or had seen ill fortune on the Atlantic seaboard, or 
had found prairie farming too slow, or perchance 
had not been a welcome member of settled society. 
Whatever his conditions, he found himself in a land 
of realities and of dreams, and there were no greater 
dreams than some of the realities ; he was apart 
from the restraints of society, and was often the 
more careless and violent, but more honest rather 
than less, for there is something in the western air, 
belonging perhaps to any frontier, which keeps 
being and seeming close together, and marks hypoc- 
risy as the most loathsome of vices. Unduly careless 
it may be of conventionality, a new country frees 
itself from many self-imposed thralls of older com- 



MOUNTAIN, MINE, AND FOREST 



265 



munities. As the frontiersman is free from the re- 
straints, so he is bereft of the protection, of civilized 
society, and he becomes his own sheriff, court, and 
executioner ; and the past generation in California or 
Arizona has in this regard brought back the condi- 
tions of a hundred and twenty-five years ago on the 
Holston and the Cumberland. 




Fig. 56. Panning Gold at Cripple Creek in Earlier Days. 

The very names given to the mines are full of the 
flavor of the frontier, and draw, in a bold line or two, 
pictures of men that must decide instantly, stake all 
on a venture, and follow failure with another trial, 
untrammeled by ordinary standards of conduct, and 
undismayed even by fate. Some personal history 
of success or failure is often hinted, — Lost Contact, 



266 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

Last Dollar, Puzzler, Pay Rock, Last Chance. The 
fair sex are generously remembered, — Yankee Girl, 
Henrietta, Minnie, Delia, Edith, Little Annie, and 
Maid of Erin. And some shall remain unclassified, 
— Smuggler, Modoc, Argonaut, Big Indian, Mul- 
doon, Whale, Holy Moses, and Morning Glim. Even 
the saloons are not to be outdone in invention, — 
First Chance (at the fringe of the camp), Chamber 
of Commerce, Board of Trade, Early Morning, and 
Magnet. 

Shall we say that the young, the hardy, and the 
daring went West? And when they reached the 
mountains they dropped the shell of custom, took up 
their great tasks, grew strong with achievement, made 
fortunes for themselves or others, and hewed out 
states. He looks on the surface, who sees only 
profanity and light regard of human life, and does 
not see the bursting of a seed in new soil, and its 
upward growth in air free from the vapors of the low- 
land and the fogs of the sea border, where the sun 
ever shines, the pulse beats sturdily, and all the 
physical conditions tend to maintain, into more settled 
days, the energy and pace of the frontier period. 

It is hardly safe to discount a pair of overalls 
anywhere, much less among the Rocky Mountains. 
There are universities now among the heights, and if 
there were not, under the coarse garb is apt to be a 
son of Harvard, Yale, Columbia, or Michigan. With 
enterprise go cordiality and helpfulness, and neither 
projects nor men are scrutinized with long and suspi- 
cious gaze before confidence is extended. And there 
is more moderation than the East gives the West 



MOUNTAIN, MINE, AND FOREST 267 

credit for having. In the depressing months of 1893, 
among the mines, one heard no recriminations, and 
more often a pleasantry, as upon the "inconvenience 
of having a poor father-in-law." And there was 
no disloyalty to the western home. " You'll dream 
about this country," said an old-timer from Aspen, 
coming through South Park. And a mulatto woman 
in a town on the Rio Grande and Western voiced be- 
yond doubt the feeling of every citizen of Colorado, 
— "Well, Ymkeah, and I guess unless there's a mighty 
upheaval, I'll stay heah ! " 

If we follow the Rocky Mountains southward, they 
will carry us into New Mexico, and when we have 
reached Sante Fe or Las Vegas, the ranges have 
melted away into the plateau, lofty and dry, of which 
the territory is mainly composed. Southward, in 
western Texas, distinctive ranges reappear, and con- 
nect, across the Rio Grande, with the mountains of 
Mexico. Eastern New Mexico continues the hig'i 
plains of Texas, and must mainly serve as a land of 
pasturage, except where irrigation is possible. This 
limits tillage to the borders of the Canadian and Pecos 
rivers. Western New Mexico is much of it too arid 
even for herds, except along the San Juan River in 
the northwest, which gains thus a store of water from 
the mountains of Colorado. The chief stream is the 
Rio Grande, which divides the territory from north 
to south. But here comes in a vexatious interstate 
problem, for there are canals enough on the upper 
river in Colorado to take all the water in the dry 
months, and no water now reaches the southern end 
of the territory during the irrigation season. The 



268 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

only solution apparently lies in the construction of 
reservoirs. 

Northward the Rocky Mountains lead us into Wyo- 
ming. It is a state similar in size, shape, and climate 
to Colorado. Like its neighbor, it is made up of 
mountain and plateau, but the differences are impor- 
tant. Colorado has a continuous backbone of high 
mountains. In Wyoming the ranges break down, 
leaving an easy passage from east to west through its 
central parts. This easy way has been found and 
followed by the Union Pacific Railway in its course 
from Nebraska to Utah. The Park Range from 
Colorado fades out in southern Wyoming; but the 
mountains reappear in rugged grandeur in central and 
northwestern Wyoming, in the Wind River Range, 
with its gorges and glaciers, and with few peaks ever 
scaled by man. Out of the northwestern corner of 
the state is carved the Yellowstone National Park. 

Wyoming is in its drainage almost as inclusive as 
Colorado. From the North Park in the latter state it 
receives the North Platte head waters, which take a 
wide curve in the heart of the region. Northward it 
sends the North Cheyenne, the Powder, and the Big 
Horn to the Missouri. Over against the sources of 
the Big Horn River the Wind River Mountains send 
rolling to the south a great portion of the waters that 
have worn the canyons of the Colorado, while in the 
west the Snake River gathers its contribution for the 
Columbia. Without violating strong state pride one 
may yet aver, that having told the story of one Rocky 
Mountain state, it has been, in essentials, told for all. 
Each has its mountains and dry uplands, each has its 



MOUNTAIN, MINE, AND FOREST 269 

waters of which it saves as much as it can, each sends 
its herds over wide ranges for the sparse but nutritious 
grasses of the desert, and each has its share of min- 
eral wealth. More than six hundred thousand acres 
are under the ditch in Wyoming, and nearly all of 
this land is devoted to forage crops, for agriculture 
here belongs almost entirely to the herd. 

The ranges of the northern Rockies are in Mon- 
tana and Idaho, and their direction is northwest and 
southeast. They are rugged, but not so lofty as the 
mountains of Colorado, and being farther north they 
harbor most of the small glaciers yet remaining in 
the Rocky Mountain region. Here are the northern 
sources of the Missouri and the southern sources of 
the Columbia River. Montana is a vast state, with a 
broad western hem of mountains, and a wide stretch 
of plateau watered and drained by the Missouri and 
its branches. Being in the far northwest, it has been 
occupied until recent years by those who were willing 
to live in isolation and care for cattle and sheep, or 
by those who, with more adventure or more capital, 
sought mineral treasure among the mountains about 
Butte and Bozeman. But with a climate not too 
severe and wide areas of arable soil, agriculture has 
risen to enormous proportions, and the ranch shares 
the state with closely settled groups of farmers. 
Almost a million acres are now subject to irrigation, 
as much as in Colorado or California a few years ago. 
The climate is more moist than in the states to the 
south, and being cooler there is less evaporation, so 
that much more is possible without irrigation than in 
most plateau and mountain states. Two transconti- 



270 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

nental lines of railway serve for exchange with the 
East and the Pacific coast. 

Like Montana, Idaho consists of mountain and 
plateau, but the latter is of another origin. The 
plateau of Montana is but a westward extension of 
the Great Plains, and in its northeast has an area of 
dissected strata forming bad lands, which are wholly 
as bad as any in Nebraska or Dakota. The plateau 
in Idaho lies broadly along the Snake River, which, 
rising in the Wind River Mountain* of Wyoming, 
crosses southern Idaho by a wide curve from east to 
west. Here are the beginnings of the lava plains 
of the Northwest, and they occupy many thousand 
square miles, stretching broadly across southern 
Idaho and far over the eastern parts of Oregon and 
Washington, along the Snake and Columbia rivers. 
These lavas have been poured out of many vents or 
fissures now concealed and unknown, and are in 
some places three or four thousand feet in thickness. 
Often they have exceedingly smooth surfaces, and 
elsewhere they are diversified by volcanic cones and 
necks, by dislocations and by deep-cut channels of 
streams, such as the canyons of the Snake River. 
The prevailing species of vegetation is sage-brush, 
which gives its hue to the landscape ; but hundreds 
•of other plants occur, and the grasses furnish pastur- 
age, and the soils when brought under the ditch are 
productive. And in the more northerly parts of 
Idaho, and near the base of the mountains, are lands 
better watered and raising the hardier grains and 
fruits freely. Few states show more variety of sur- 
face than Utah. In most of its eastern half are the 



272 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

Colorado or High Plateaus, regions of horizontal 
strata whose capping beds are six to eight thousand 
feet above the sea, broken into blocks by profound 
fissures, and dissected by streams, forming canyons 
only inferior in greatness to the Grand Canyon of 
Arizona. On the borders of the Colorado are the 
Henry Mountains, formed by subterranean intrusions 
of lava which domed up the overlying strata. The 
present mountain form has been reached through the 
removal by surface erosion of the upper parts of 
the domes, down into the lava itself. 

In the north are high mountains of another sort. 
Contrary to Cordilleran custom, the range of the 
Uinta Mountains runs east and west — a broad up- 
arching of the strata, making a range eleven thou- 
sand feet in height. It stands like a rampart against 
the border of Wyoming, and through it the Green 
River has cut a sinuous gorge. 

On the west the plateaus are bordered by the Wa- 
satch Mountains, which present a less imposing front 
to the higher land on the east, but rise lofty and 
magnificent from the Great Basin. The basin we 
have entered already, to observe its ancient shore 
lines, its lake-bottom soils, its narrow ranges of 
mountains, and its clusters of human habitations 
clinging to the streams of the Wasatch. Four 
groups of mountain heights, all showing important 
differences of origin and structure, and two sets of 
plateaus, one lofty and broken, the other low and 
smooth, fresh waters, salt waters, deserts, forests and 
farms, gardens and mines — such are the contrasts 
of this central commonwealth of the Cordilleras. 



MOUNTAIN, MINE, AND FOREST 273 

No state has more curious interest than Nevada, 
whose conditions as a whole are more discouraging, 
not to say hostile, to human life than in any other 
field of the western United States. With western 
Utah it is a part, and by far the greater part, of the 
Great Basin. It is shut in by the Wasatch on the 
east and the towering Sierras on the west. It sends 
no stream to the sea, and the rivers which its meager 
waters keep in flow lose themselves in lakes which 
often become alkaline flats in the dry season. Like 
Utah, Nevada bears the records of a vast prehistoric 
lake, not so large nor so compact as its eastern neigh- 
bor, the Lake Lahontan of the geologists. The 
land is about five thousand feet above the ocean at 
the north, and declines below the level of the sea in 
the extreme south of the basin. The Basin Ranges 
interrupt the plains and save them from the monot- 
ony and dryness of absolute desert. 

Nevada could scarcely have been admitted to the 
Union but for political necessity, and now has a pop- 
ulation of 43,335, less than that of Akron, O. ; Dallas, 
Tex. ; Holyoke, Mass. ; Norfolk, Va. ; or Saginaw, 
Mich. Rhode Island has 428,000 people, or 407 for 
each square mile. The big western state, more than 
twice as large as New York, has four-tenths of a 
person for each square mile. Arid Wyoming has 
nearly a hundred thousand, and Oklahoma, not yet 
admitted to statehood, has almost four hundred thou- 
sand people. 

The future population of Nevada is absolutely lim- 
ited by her scant supplies of water ; and yet, with all 
possible storage, some hundreds of thousands of men 



274 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

and women can find homes within her borders. 
And when this day comes there will be stable pros- 
perity, in no way like the fitful boom that built 
Virginia City and worked the Comstock Lode until 
the scalding waters of the lower levels could be 
endured no longer, and Nevada ceased to herald its 
bonanzas. 

The state has three incorporated towns, and not 
one with a census roll of five thousand. Virginia 
City declined in the last decade from 85 n to 2695. 
But this is of small import when we look at the irri- 
gation map and see black patches representing more 
than a half million of acres of watered lands, whose 
annual product is worth nearly six million dollars. 
For whatever of human comfort and prosperity is 
possible, the way is open, even in Nevada, and, as in 
southern California, intensive work with careful adap- 
tation of valuable crops to small watered areas may 
achieve results beyond expectation. 

The sparseness of populations of the West appears 
in another way. Twelve cities in the eleven divi- 
sions of the Cordilleran belt had, in 1900, twenty-five 
thousand people or more. Eight of these are in 
the three states of the Pacific coast, leaving but four 
to the eight vast states and territories that remain. 
Those four are Denver, Pueblo, Butte, and Salt Lake 
City. No Cordilleran state or territory has as many 
as ten people to a square mile, though California 
almost reaches it, and for more than half these states 
the average population of a square mile is less than 
two persons. Even under the limitations of the 
water supply the field for expansion is enormous. 



MOUNTAIN, MINE, AND FOREST 275 

In 1803 Louisiana was purchased, bringing an 
empire to the United States, but it was the Great 
Unknown. The fur trade had its headquarters at St. 
Louis, and the trappers brought their pelts and their 
stores from the plains beyond ; but no map had been 
made, little was known of the wild and mysterious 
tribes of the upper Missouri, and no white man had 
seen the northern Rocky Mountains or gone from 
the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean. Jeffer- 
son selected Captains Lewis and Clark to find out 
what lay beyond the horizon, and with a small party 
of laborers and soldiers they left St. Louis in 1803. 
They went up the Missouri River and were lost in 
the wilderness, whence they emerged in 1806, having 
completed the most daring, important, and famous 
exploration ever undertaken within the United States. 
Their route could be traced by the chain of names 
which they gave to river and mountain between the 
mouth of the Missouri and the mouth of the Colum- 
bia rivers. On the Missouri in Nebraska they made 
peace with the Indians of the plains, and of this the 
city of Council Bluffs, across the river in Iowa, is 
a memorial. They saw the dark coniferous forests 
of the Black Hills, passed the mouth of the Yellow- 
stone, carried their boats around the Great Falls of 
the Missouri, climbed the Rocky Mountains, named 
the sources of the Missouri, went down into the 
basin of the Columbia, appeased their hunger upon 
its salmon, saw the glistening Rainier, and camped 
upon the desolate shores of the Pacific Ocean. They 
conciliated where they could, fought where they 
must, waded the snows, kept their note-books, traced 



2?6 



GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 



their maps, finished what they were sent to do, and 
came back to civilization. 

In 1807 Lieutenant Z. M. Pike, having previously 
sought the sources of the Mississippi, turned his 




Fig. 58. The Old Way. Pike's Peak Trail at Minnehaha Falls. 



steps westward toward the waters of the upper Ar- 
kansas, and fastened his name upon the best-known 
though not the highest peak of the Rocky Moun- 
tains. Major S. H. Long went from Pittsburg to 
the Rocky Mountains in 1819-20, and likewise left 
his name upon one of the lofty peaks of the Colo- 
rado. Three years later, in going to the upper 



MOUNTAIN, MINE, AND FOREST 



277 



Mississippi country, he passed Lake Michigan and 
found at Chicago " a few miserable huts inhabited by 
a miserable race of men." 

The explorations of Captain B. L. E. Bonneville 
have more than geographic interest, because his jour- 




Fig. 59. The New Way. Cog Railway at Minnehaha Falls. 



nals afterward came under the editorial hand of 
Washington Irving, who gave them literary form and 
sent them out in the series of his works. Bonneville 
was a soldier, who asked leave from the United States 
Army to carry out, with such funds and men as he 
could himself secure, a search into the distant West. 
His work was done in the years 1832-36 and was 
primarily in the interest of the fur trade, a business 



278 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

which lies at the foundation of much primitive history 
in the United States. Later authorities have ascribed 
to Bonneville the first correct account of the drainage 
of the region west of the Rocky Mountains, the re- 
gion now known as the Great Basin. He it was that 
showed the interior character of this drainage, fixed 
the sources of the Willamette, San Joaquin, and Sac- 
ramento, and brushed away some of the geographic 
myths of Spanish writers. His search extended to the 
sources of the Yellowstone, of which he made a map. 

The explorations of Captain J. C. Fremont followed 
by a dozen years and more. His work suggests the 
persistency of an error which was natural enough at 
the time, the belief, based on his reports, that the Great 
Basin is walled in by lofty mountains, making a con- 
tinuous rim. This is suggested by the Wasatch and 
the Sierras on the east and west, but is not true to 
the north or south. Indeed, the long descent of the 
floor of the basin southward makes it perfectly possi- 
ble, so far as land form is concerned, for an ordinary 
drainage system to develop, to drain all the shallow 
lakes of the basin and join the lower Colorado. The 
dryness of the climate is the only obstacle. 

The roll of explorers for the middle decades of the 
nineteenth century is a long one, and bears the names 
of many soldiers, engineers, and men of science, and 
their scattered tours and investigations led down to 
that comprehensive system of surveys for opening 
routes of travel to the Pacific Ocean which was in 
operation in the fifties under the authority of the War 
Department, of which Jefferson Davis was secretary. 
Profiles, climate, magnetism, geology, botany, zoology, 



MOUNTAIN, MINE, AND FOREST 279 

and native tribes were all made objects of study, and 
a half-dozen routes were followed, in the north, in the 
south, and across the Rockies of Colorado. In this 
region Gunnison sought a line by the Sangre de Cristo 
Range and the Coochetopa Pass of the Sawatch. 
This was pronounced impossible, and Lieutenant 
Beckwith, who took command after Gunnison's death, 
said, " No other line exists in the immediate vicinity 
of this worthy of any attention in connection with the 
construction of a railroad from the Mississippi River 
to the Great Basin." This reads oddly in the presence 
of the Denver and Rio Grande, threading the Royal 
Gorge and the Marshall and Tennessee passes, or the 
Colorado Midland, sending its trains by Ute Pass and 
the South Park, past Leadville, and over the Continen- 
tal Divide. 

In these early explorations the naturalists who 
accompanied the engineers got their knowledge as 
they could, often only in fragments because of haste. 
But there followed upon the close of the Civil War 
the formal geographic and geological study of many 
areas, by various bodies known as the Hayden, 
Wheeler, King, and Powell surveys, and finally by 
the United States Geological Survey. The union of 
theoretical knowledge with the lessons of experience 
has never had a finer illustration than in the develop- 
ment of the mountains and plateaus of the West. 

Will man in the West or in the East be friendly to 
the forests ? There is no greater economic question 
than this, and there can be in the end but one 
answer, for experience has taught hard lessons in 
some parts of our domain. The forests are on the 



280 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

mountains of the Cordilleran province, and they 
shield the lowlands of the Pacific coast. They 
belong in the most vital way to the problem of irri- 
gation, for they store and dole out the waters which 
otherwise would rush unhindered to the sea, carrying 
the soils of the slopes, and destroying the bottom 
lands with floods. Hence the life of millions of 
people depends on the saving of the forests. It is a 
worthy sentiment that would save from fire and ax 
the noble Sequoia that has been growing for two 
thousand years, but there is more than sentiment in 
it. The earth's machinery is full of mutually depend- 
ent parts, to injure one of which is to destroy all. 

In the Cascade and Ashland Forest reserves of 
Oregon but 25,000 out of 3,000,000 acres of forest 
have escaped the havoc made by fires. Some of the 
fires belong to the period of Indian occupancy, but 
by far the greater fires and in greater number have 
occurred since the white man came. But fires are 
less common in recent years. Little game is left, 
hunting-parties are few, there is much private owner- 
ship and more precaution, and the humus layer, once 
destroyed, no longer harbors and spreads the blaze. 
The Indian's reasons for firing were : that grass 
might grow near his camps, or that he might have 
clear hunting-grounds. The white man fired the 
woods to attract game, to open roadways, to promote 
the growth of grass, or through careless leaving of 
camp-fires. In one case where a fire was set to 
allure game, a half-dozen deer were obtained and 
fifteen to twenty million feet of timber were de- 
stroyed, the fire raging until put out by the fall 



282 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

rains. One fire was set to remove a windfall log 
from the road, and three thousand acres of forest 
were burned. In some cases the soil, almost purely 
vegetable in constitution, is completely burned away, 
leaving the bare rock. Many hundred years would 
be required to renew the soil and replace the forest. 
In the Cascade Reserve the fire loss during the past 
forty years amounted to seven thousand million feet 
of mill timber. 

The shake maker has wasted untold amounts of 
timber. For these long coarse shingles he seeks the 
straight, well-splitting trunks, especially of the sugar 
pine, leaving enormous tops to rot, or to feed forest 
fires. 

Sheep pasturing is more ruinous than cattle graz- 
ing, and there is a conspicuous dearth of seedlings 
where herds and flocks have filled the forest. The 
sheep herders start many fires, and while the forest 
ranger warns the trespasser to leave the ground, he 
is likely to get the answer that " bullets alone will be 
obeyed." Shake makers chip the trunks to test the 
grain. The resin runs out and down the tree, and 
the fires follow the line of fuel up the trunk and en- 
large the scars made from year to year. 

The Sequoias are not as near extinction as is sup- 
posed. There are many thousands of them in the 
reserves of California, but these noble patriarchs 
must be guarded from destroying selfishness. 

There is but one course for the national govern- 
ment, and this has been entered upon with vigor and 
reward. The Cascade and Sierra ranges show an 
almost continuous belt of reserves. Others are found 



284 GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 

in every Cordilleran state, scores of thousands of acres, 
to be kept for the common weal, to be policed, and 
saved — their perennial springs, their straight trunks, 
their ample shade, their rich soil, their refreshing 
silences, rescued from the wickedness of the few, for 
the good of all. 

The national government has a like problem and 
a similar duty in the East. The President, the Sec- 
retary of Agriculture, the geologist, and other men of 
science have pressed the need home upon Congress, 
and within a few days of this time adjournment has 
been had without action upon a forest reserve in the 
southern Appalachians. Here are the finest hard- 
wood forests in America. Here is one of the heaviest 
rainfalls in the United States, with enormous capacity 
for destructive floods. As in the West, so in the East, 
the spongy soil cover once lost is lost forever, so far 
as present generations are concerned. Centuries do 
not work as much ruin under the forest cover as is 
done in a single storm after the lands have been made 
bare. Every southeastern state is involved, either 
bearing the forest slopes or receiving the waters 
upon its lowlands. Every water power in the hilly 
south is put to risk, and every acre of rich soil upon 
the river bottom. To save the forests for their timber, 
their beauty, and their health-giving shades, to save 
them for the farms and factories, and to save them at 
once, is the duty of the nation. 

More than $10,000,000 was the sum of flood losses 
in the Appalachian states during the year 1901. 
With the abundant rains, wherever a slope of any 
steepness is cleared, it is cropped but for a few years, 



MOUNTAIN, MINE, AND FOREST 285 

the soil is washed into the streams, tillage is given up, 
and the field is abandoned to ever deepening gullies. 
Meantime the rich bottom lands below are either exca- 
vated and removed bodily by the torrents, or they are 
deluged with five, eight, or ten feet of stony waste, and 
become as useless as a gravelly river bed. Ten years 
of delay would be fatal. The single states cannot do 
the work. North Carolina owns much of the forest, 
but the advantage is more for Tennessee. One state 
cannot be expected to legislate, and tax itself for the 
benefit of its neighbor. As with irrigation, so here is 
a federal question. 

These are the fresh problems of the twentieth cen- 
tury. We must control the mountains streams, to 
turn wheels, to avert floods, to make the soils fruitful; 
we must save the forests for themselves, for the soils, 
and for the fruitfulness of the lowlands. We must 
find, the world over, the grains and fruits that will 
grow with most water and least, in the hot south or 
cool north; we must adjust ourselves to mountain, 
plateau, and plain, to river and sea ; and future gen- 
erations better than ourselves will be able to see 
how geographic influences gave permanent molding 
to the national life. 



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